http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910a/Dewey_1910_a.html

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Originally published as:

John Dewey. "What is thought?" Chapter 1 in How we think. Lexington, Mass: D.C.

Heath, (1910): 1-13.

How We Think

Chapter 1: What is Thought

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� I. Varied Senses of the Term

Four senses of thought, from the wider to the limited

No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied,

indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them.

The aim of this chapter is to find a single consistent meaning. Assistance may be had by

considering some typical ways in which the terms are employed. In the first place

thought is used broadly, not to say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that "goes

through our heads," is called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in

any way whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding whatever is directly

presented; we think (or think of) only such things as we do not directly see, hear, smell,

or taste. Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs that rest upon some kind of

evidence or testimony. Of this third type, two kinds ― or, rather, two degrees ― must

be discriminated. In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to

state the grounds that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is

deliberately sought and its

(2) adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought; it

alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principal subject of this

volume. We shall now briefly describe each of the four senses.

Chance and idle thinking

1. In its loosest sense, thinking signifies everything that, as we say, is "in our heads " or

that "goes through our minds." He who offers "a penny for your thoughts" does not

expect to drive any great bargain. In calling the objects of his demand thoughts, he does

not intend to ascribe to them dignity, consecutiveness, or truth. Any idle fancy, trivial

recollection, or flitting impression will satisfy his demand. Daydreaming, building of

castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and disconnected material that floats through

our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random sense, thinking. More of our waking

life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this

inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope.

Reflective thought is consecutive, not merely a sequence

In this sense, silly folk and dullards think. The story is told of a man in slight repute for

intelligence, who, desiring to be chosen selectman in his New England town, addressed

a knot of neighbors in this wise: "I hear you don't believe I know enough to hold office.

I wish you to understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time."

Now reflective thought is like this random coursing of things through the mind in that it

consists of a succession of things thought of ; but it is unlike, in that the mere chance

occurrence of any chance "something or other" in an irregular sequence does not

suffice. Reflection involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a consequence ― a

consecutive ordering in such a way that

(3) each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its

predecessors. The successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of one another

and support one another; they do not come and go in a medley. Each phase is a step

from something to something ― technically speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term

leaves a deposit which is utilized in the next term. The stream or flow becomes a train,

chain, or thread.

The restriction of thinking to what goes beyond direct observation

Reflective thought aims, however, at belief

II. Even when thinking is used in a broad sense, it is usually restricted to matters not

directly perceived: to what we do not see, smell, hear, or touch. We ask the man telling

a story if he saw a certain incident happen, and his reply may be, " No, I only thought of

it." A note of invention, as distinct from faithful record of observation, is present. Most

important in this class are successions of imaginative incidents and episodes which,

having a certain coherence, hanging together on a continuous thread, lie between

kaleidoscopic flights of fancy and considerations deliberately employed to establish a

conclusion. The imaginative stories poured forth by children possess all degrees of

internal congruity; some are disjointed, some are articulated. When connected, they

simulate reflective thought; indeed, they usually occur in minds of logical capacity.

These imaginative enterprises often precede thinking of the close-knit type and prepare

the way for it. But they do not aim at knowledge, at belief about facts or in truths ; and

thereby they are marked off from reflective thought even when they most resemble it.

Those who express such thoughts do not expect credence, but rather credit for a well-

constructed plot or a well-arranged climax. They produce good stories, not ― unless by

chance ―

(4) knowledge. Such thoughts are an efflorescence of feeling; the enhancement of a

mood or sentiment is their aim; congruity of emotion, their binding tie.

Thought Induces belief in two ways

III. In its next sense, thought denotes belief resting upon some basis, that is, real or

supposed knowledge going beyond what is directly present. It is marked by acceptance

or rejection of something as reasonably probable or improbable. This phase of thought,

however, includes two such distinct types of belief that, even though their difference is

strictly one of degree, not of kind, it becomes practically important to consider them

separately. Some beliefs are accepted when their grounds have not themselves been

considered, others are accepted because their grounds have been examined.

When we say, " Men used to think the world was flat," or, I thought you went by the

house," we express belief something is accepted, held to, acquiesced in, or affirmed. But

such thoughts may mean a supposition accepted without reference to its real grounds.

These may be adequate, they may not; but their value with reference to the support they

afford the belief has not been considered.

Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct

belief. They are picked up ― we know not how. From obscure sources and by

unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into acceptance and become

unconsciously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, imitation ― all of

which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in

with a strong passion ― are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is,

prejudgments, not

(5) judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.[1]

Thinking in its best sense is that which considers the basis and consequences of belief

IV. Thoughts that result in belief have an importance I attached to them which leads to

reflective thought to conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearings of the

belief. To think of whales and camels in the clouds is to entertain ourselves with fancies,

terminable at our pleasure, which do not lead to any belief in particular. But to think of

the world as flat is to ascribe a quality to a real thing as its real property. This

conclusion denotes a connection among things and hence is not, like imaginative

thought, plastic to our mood. Belief in the world's flatness commits him who holds it to

thinking in certain specific ways of other objects, such as the heavenly bodies,

antipodes, the possibility of navigation. It prescribes to him actions in accordance with

his conception of these objects.

The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be so

important, then, that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons of their belief

and its logical consequences. This means reflective thought -thought in its eulogistic

and emphatic sense.

Men thought the world was flat until Columbus thought it to be round. The earlier

thought was a belief held because men had not the energy or the courage to question

what those about them accepted and taught, especially as it was suggested and

seemingly confirmed by obvious sensible facts. The thought of Columbus was a

reasoned conclusion. It marked the close of study into facts, of scrutiny and revision of

evidence, of working out the implications of various hypotheses, and of

Reflective thought defined

(6) comparing these theoretical results with one another and with known facts. acts.

Because Columbus did not accept unhesitatingly the current traditional theory, because

he doubted and inquired, he arrived at his thought. Skeptical of what, from long habit,

seemed most certain, and credulous of what seemed impossible, he went on thinking

until he could produce evidence for both his confidence and his disbelief. Even if his

conclusion had finally turned out wrong, it would have been a different sort of belief

from those it antagonized, because it was reached by a different method. Active,

persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the

light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends,

constitutes reflective thought. Any one of the first three kinds of thought may elicit this

type; but once begun, it is a conscious and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a

firm basis of reasons.

� 2.The Central Factor in Thinking

There is a common element in all types of thought:

There are, however, no sharp lines of demarcation between the various operations just

outlined. The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection would be much easier

than it is, did not the different modes of thinking blend insensibly into one another. So

far, we have considered rather extreme instances of each kind in order to get the field

clearly before us. Let us now reverse this operation; let us consider a rudimentary case

of thinking, lying between careful examination of evidence and a mere irresponsible

stream of fancies. A man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the last time he

observed it; but presently be notes, while occupied primarily with other things, that the

air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to

(7) rain; looking up, he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he then

quickens his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be called thought? Neither

the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a thought. Walking is one direction of

activity; looking and noting are other modes of activity. The likelihood that it will rain

is, however, something suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold ; he thinks of clouds and

a coming shower.

viz. suggestion of something not observed.

But reflection involves also the relation of signifying

So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is reminded of a

human figure and face. Thinking in both of these cases (the cases of belief and of fancy)

involves a noted or perceived fact, followed by something else which is not observed

but which is brought to mind, suggested by the thing seen. One reminds us, as we say,

of the other. Side by side, however, with this factor of agreement in the two cases of

suggestion is a factor of marked disagreement. We do not believe in the face suggested

by the cloud; we do not consider at all the probability of its being a fact. There is no

reflective thought. The danger of rain, on the contrary, presents itself to us as a genuine

possibility -as a possible fact of the same nature as the observed coolness. Put

differently, we do not regard the cloud as meaning or indicating a face, but merely as

suggesting it, while we do consider that the coolness may mean rain. In the first case,

seeing an object, we just happen, as we say, to think of something else; in the second,

we consider the possibility and nature of the connection between the object seen and the

object suggested. The seen thing is regarded as in some way the ground or basis of

belief in the suggested thing; it possesses the quality of evidence.

Various synonymous expressions for the function of signifying

(8)This function by which one thing signifies or indicates another, and thereby leads us

to consider how far one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the other, is, then, the

central factor in all reflective or distinctively intellectual thinking. By calling up various

situations to which such terms as signifies and indicates apply, the student will best

realize for himself the actual facts denoted by the words reflective thought. Synonyms

for these terms are: points to, tells of, betokens, prognosticates, represents, stands for,

implies.[2] We also say one thing portends another; is ominous of another, or a

symptom of it, or a key to it, or (if the connection is quite obscure) that it gives a hint,

clue, or intimation.

Reflection and belief on evidence

Reflection thus implies that something is believed in or disbelieved in), not on its own

direct account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof,

voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly

experienced; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the looks of the grass and

trees, or that it is going to rain because of the condition of the air or the state of the

barometer. At one time, we see a man (or suppose we do) without any intermediary fact;

at another time, we are not quite sure what we see, and hunt for accompanying facts that

will serve as signs, indications, tokens of what is to be believed.

Thinking, for the purposes of this inquiry, is defined accordingly as that operation in

which present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce be-

(9) -lief in the latter upon the ground or warrant of the former. We do not put beliefs

that rest simply on inference on the surest level of assurance. To say " I think so "

implies that I do not as yet know so. The inferential belief may later be confirmed and

come to stand as sure, but in itself it always has a certain element of supposition.

� 3. Elements in Reflective Thinking

So much for the description of the more external and obvious aspects of the fact called

thinking. Further consideration at once reveals certain subprocesses which are involved

in every reflective operation. These are: (a) a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and

(b) an act of search or investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which

serve to corroborate or to nullify the suggested belief.

The importance of uncertainty

(a) In our illustration, the shock of coolness generated confusion and suspended belief,

at least momentarily. Because it was unexpected, it was a shock or an interruption

needing to be accounted for, identified, or placed. To say that the abrupt occurrence of

the change of temperature constitutes a problem may sound forced and artificial; but if

we are willing to extend the meaning of the word problem to whatever ― no matter

how slight and commonplace in character ― perplexes and challenges the mind so that

it makes belief at all uncertain, there is a genuine problem or question involved in this

experience of sudden change.

and of inquiry in order to test

(b) The turning of the head, the lifting of the eyes, the scanning of the heavens, are

activities adapted to bring to recognition facts that will answer the question presented by

the sudden coolness. The facts as they

(10) first presented themselves were perplexing; they suggested, however, clouds. The

act of looking was an act to discover if this suggested explanation held good. It may

again seem forced to speak of this looking, almost automatic, as an act of research or

inquiry. But once more, if we are willing to generalize our conceptions of our mental

operations to include the trivial and ordinary as well as the technical and recondite,

there is no good reason for refusing to give such a title to the act of looking. The purport

of this act of inquiry is to confirm or to refute the suggested belief. New facts are

brought to perception, which either corroborate the idea that a change of weather is

imminent, or negate it.

Finding one's way an illustration of reflection

Another instance, commonplace also, yet not quite so trivial, may enforce this lesson. A

man traveling in an unfamiliar region comes to a branching of the roads. Having no sure

knowledge to fall back upon, he is brought to a standstill of hesitation and suspense.

Which road is right? And how shall perplexity be resolved? There are but two

alternatives: he must either blindly and arbitrarily take his course, trusting to luck for

the outcome, or he must discover grounds for the conclusion that a given road is right.

Any attempt to decide the matter by thinking will involve inquiry into other facts,

whether brought out by memory or by further observation, or by both. The perplexed

wayfarer must carefully scrutinize what is before him and he must cudgel his memory.

He looks for evidence that will support belief in favor of either of the roads -for

evidence that will weight down one suggestion. He may climb a tree; he may go first in

this direction, then in that, looking, in either case, for signs, clues,

(11) indications. He wants something in the nature of a signboard or a map, and his

reflection is aimed at the discovery of facts that will serve this purpose.

Possible, yet incompatible, suggestions

The above illustration may be generalized. Thinking begins in what may fairly enough

be called a forked- road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a

dilemma, which proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly along

from one thing to another, or as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies

at pleasure, there is no call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of

reaching a belief brings us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we

metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey

additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how

the facts stand related to one another.

Regulation of thinking by its purpose

Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire

process of reflection. Where there is no question of a problem to be solved or a

difficulty to be surmounted, the course of suggestions flows on at random; we have the

first type of thought described. If the stream of suggestions is controlled simply by their

emotional congruity, their fitting agreeably into a single picture or story, we have the

second type. But a question to be answered, an ambiguity to be resolved, sets up an end

and holds the current of ideas to a definite channel. Every suggested conclusion is tested

by its reference to this regulating end, by its pertinence to the problem in band. This

need of straightening out a perplexity also controls the kind of inquiry undertaken. A

traveler whose end is the most beautiful path will look for other considerations and

(12) will test suggestions occurring to him on another principle than if he wishes to

discover the way to a given city. The problem fixes the end of thought and the end

controls the process of thinking.

� 4. Summary

Origin and stimulus

We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion,

or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "

general principles." There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. General

appeals to a child (or to a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own

experience of some difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile

as advice to lift himself by his boot-straps.

Suggestion and past experience

Given a difficulty, the next step is suggestion of some way out-the formation of some

tentative plan or project, the entertaining of some theory which will account for the

peculiarities in question, the consideration of some solution for the problem. The -data

at hand cannot supply the solution; they can only suggest it. What, then, are the sources

of the suggestion ? Clearly past experience and prior knowledge. If the person has had

some acquaintance with similar situations, if he has dealt with material of the same sort

before, suggestions more or less apt and helpful are likely to arise. But unless there has

been experience in some degree analogous, which may now be represented in

imagination, confusion remains mere confusion. There is nothing upon which to draw in

order to clarify it. Even when a child (or a grown-up) has a problem, to urge him to

think when be has no prior experiences involving some of the same conditions, is

wholly futile.

Exploration and testing

(13) If the suggestion that occurs is at once accepted, we have uncritical thinking, the

minimum of reflection. To turn the thing over in mind, to reflect, means to hunt for

additional evidence, for new data, that will develop the suggestion, and will either, as

we say, bear it out or else make obvious its absurdity and irrelevance. Given a genuine

difficulty and a reasonable amount of analogous experience to draw upon, the

difference, par excellence, between good and bad thinking is found at this point. The

easiest way is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible and thereby bring to an end

the condition of mental uneasiness. Reflective thinking is always more or less

troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept

suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental

unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during

further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful. As we shall see later, the

most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the

attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for

new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain

the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry ― these are the

essentials of thinking.

Notes

1. This mode of thinking in its contrast with thoughtful inquiry receives special

notice in the next chapter.

2. Implies is more often used when a principle or general truth brings about belief

in some other truth; the other phrases are more frequently used to denote the

cases in which one fact or event leads us to believe in something else.

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http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1906.html

[Bajado el 23 de agosto de 2011]

Originally published as:

John Dewey. "The Terms 'Conscious' and 'Consciousness." Journal of Philosophy,

Psychology and Scientific Method 3 (1906): 39- 41.

The Terms 'Conscious' and 'Consciousness'

IN an early number of this JOURNAL[1] I gave a brief account of the historical

evolution of the significations of the term `idea' in the English language. I wish now to

consider the terms `conscious' and `consciousness'; not, however, so much with

reference to their historical development as to the different types of meaning they

represent and convey. I think this discrimination will be found not altogether irrelevant

to current problems and discussions. I take my material again from Murray's Oxford

Dictionary.

1. An early use emphasizes the `con-' factor: a social fact. Consciousness means joint, or

mutual, awareness. "To be a friend and to be conscious are terns equivalent" (South,

1664).[2] While this use is obsolete, it persists in poetic metaphor as attributed to things,

e. g., the `conscious air,' etc. It also clearly influences the next sense, which is,

2. That of being `conscious to one's self': having the witness to something within one's

self. This is naturally said especially of one's own innocence, guilt, frailties, etc., that is

of personal activities and traits, where the individual has peculiar or unique evidence not

available to others. "Being so conscious onto myself of my great weakness" (Asher,

1620). Here is a distinctively personal adaptation of the social, or ;joint, use. The agent

is, so to speak, reduplicated. In one capacity, lie does certain things; in another, he is

cognizant of these goings-on. A connecting link between 1 and 2 is found in a sense

(obsolete like 1) where conscious means 'privy to,' a cognizant accomplice of,-usually, a

guilty knowledge. It is worth considering whether `self-consciousness,' in both the

moral and the philosophic sense, does not involve this distinction and relation between

the self doing and the self reflecting upon its past or future (anticipated) doings to see

what sort of an agent is implicated; and whether, in short, many of the difficulties of

self-consciousness as a 'subject- object' relation are not due to a failure to keep in mind

that it establishes connection between a

(40) practical and a cognitional attitude, not between two cognitional terms.

3. `Conscious' is also used to discriminate a certain kind of being or agent, one which

knows what it is about, which has emotions, etc., e. g., a personal being or agent, as

distinct from a stone or a plant. `Consciousness' is then used as short for such a being. It

denotes all the knowledges, intentions, emotions, etc., which make up the differential

being or activity of such a, being or agent. This practical and empirical reference to a

specific thing is seen clearly in sub-sense (a) where `conscious' means intentional,

purposive, and (b) where it means undue preoccupation with what concerns,

invidiously, one's self (the bad sense of `self-consciousness'). 'Consciousness' thus

marks off in general the difference of persons from things, and in particular the

characteristic differences between persons,---since each has his own emotions,

informations, intentions, etc. No technically philosophical sense is involved.

4. `Conscious' means aware: `consciousness,' the state of being aware. This is a wide,

colorless use; there is no discrimination nor implication as to contents, as to what there

is awareness of,-whether mental or physical, personal or impersonal, etc.

5. The distinctively philosophical use (that defined as such in the dictionary) appears to

be a peculiar combination of 2, 3 and 4. It is, in the words of the dictionary, "the state or

faculty of being conscious, as a condition and concomitant of all thought, feeling and

volition." The words I have italicized bring out the difference between thoughts, etc.,

characterizing the peculiar quality of a specific being or agent, and something which in

general lies back of and conditions all such thoughts. Consciousness is now one with

mind, or soul, or, subject, as an underlying condition hypostasized into a substance.

This identification of `mind' and `consciousness' leads to Locke's familiar doctrine

(1690), "Consciousness is the perception of what passes in one's own mind." Awareness

is borrowed from sense 4, but is limited to what is `in the mind' only. Meanwhile the

`private witness' sense of 3 more or less intentionally colors the resultant meaning.

Consciousness is distinctly `one's own' perception of `one's own' mind. As a net result,

we get a private type of existence (as distinct from private cognizance) ; of which alone

one is directly or immediately aware (as distinct from the anything and everything of 4),

while, moreover, enough is retained of the concreteness, the thingness, of 3 to make this

a special stuff or entity, although the specific and practical character of the personal

agent is eliminated, a `condition' back of particular purposes, emotions, etc., being,

substituted.

( 41)

6. Then we have a comparatively modern adaptation of 3, illustrated in a quotation from

Dickens (1837): "When the fever left him and consciousness returned, lie found," etc.

The formal definition given is, "The state of being conscious regarded as the normal

condition of a healthy, waking life." (Italics naturally mine.) The corresponding term

`conscious' is defined as "having one's mental faculties actually in an active and waking

state." (It is interesting to note that here, too, the earliest quotation dates no further back

than 1841.)

I hardly think that any one who is aware of the ambiguous senses in which the term

consciousness is habitually used in philosophical discussions and of the

misunderstandings that result, possibly of one's self and certainly of others, will regard

the foregoing as a merely linguistic contribution. It is no part of my present intention to

note the implied philosophical bearings, save to suggest that meaning 5 begs as many

metaphysical problems as is likely ever to be the privilege of any one word; that

considerations based exclusively on 4 are not likely to be conclusive against positions

that have 3 especially in mind, and vice versa; and that 6 seems to give the sense which

underlies the psychological use of the term and to give (either by itself or in connection

with 3) a standpoint from which the psychological sense can be kept free from the

logical implications of the `awareness' problem in general, and from the metaphysics of

5. To take the term `by itself' is perhaps more appropriate for `structural' psychology,

while to take it in connection with a person or agent (sense 3) is appropriate for

`functional' psychology. But in the latter case, it should be understood that

`consciousness' means not a stuff, nor an entity by itself, but is short for conscious

animal or agent,-for something which is conscious.

In making these suggestions I do not mean to indicate a belief that the different senses

have no common qualities or appropriate cross-references. On the contrary, I believe

that the connection of the logical meaning of `awareness' with the facts involved

empirically and practically in the existence of a certain sort of agent (especially as the

latter itself becomes the subject-matter of natural science) determines one of the most

real problems of present philosophy. But in discussing these problems nothing but good

could come from stating explicitly the prima facie or immediate denotation of the terms

used.

JOHN DEWEY.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

Notes

1. Vol. I., No. 7, p. 175.

2. I owe to the Editor of the JOURNAL this interesting reference to Hobbes

('Leviathan,' ch. VII.): " When two, or more, men know of one and the same

fact, they are said to be conscious of it one to another; which is as mach as to

know it together." Hobbes then uses this to explicate the moral meaning of

conscience.

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[Bajado el 23 de agosto de 2011]

A John Dewey source page

Originally published as:

John Dewey. "Intelligence of Morals", Chapter 3 in The Influence of Darwin on

Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1910) : 46 - 76.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays

Chapter 3: Intelligence and Morals[1]

Table of Contents | Next | Previous

"EXCEPT the blind forces of nature," said Sir Henry Maine, " nothing moves in this

world which is not Greek in its origin." And if we ask why this is so, the response

comes that the Greek discovered the business of man to be pursuit of good, and

intelligence to be central in this quest. The utmost to be said in praise of Plato and

Aristotle is not that they invented excellent moral theories, but that they rose to the

opportunity which the spectacle of Greek life afforded. For Athens presented an all but

complete microcosm for the study of the interaction of social organization and

individual character. A public life of rich diversity in concentrated and intense splendor

trained the civic sense. Strife of faction and the rapid oscillations of types of polity

provided the occasion for intellectual inquiry and analysis. The careers of dramatic

personalities, habits of discussion, ease of legislative change, facilities for personal

ambi-

(47) -tions, distraction by personal rivalries, fixed attention upon the elements of

character, and upon consideration of the effect of individual character on social vitality

and stability. Happy exemption from ecclesiastic preoccupations, susceptibility to

natural harmony, and natural piety conspired with frank and open observation to

acknowledgment of the role played by natural conditions. Social instability and shock

made equally pertinent and obvious the remark that only intelligence can confirm the

values that natural conditions generate, and that intelligence is itself nurtured and

matured only in a free and stable society.

In Plato the resultant analysis of the mutual implications of the individual, the social and

the natural, converged in the ideas that morals and philosophy are one: namely, a love

of that wisdom which is the source of secure and social good; that mathematics and the

natural sciences focused upon the problem of the perception of the good furnish the

materials of moral science; that logic is the method of the pregnant organization of

social conditions with respect to good; that politics and psychology are sciences of one

and the same human nature, taken first in the large and then in the little. So far that large

and expansive vision of Plato.

But projection of a better life must be based upon reflection of the life already lived.

The in

( 48) evitable limitations of the Greek city-state were inevitably wrought into the texture

of moral theory.

The business of thought was to furnish a substitute for customs which were then

relaxing from the pressure of contact and intercourse without and the friction of strife

within. Reason was to take the place of custom as a guide of life; but it was to furnish

rules as final, as unalterable as those of custom. In short, the thinkers were fascinated by

the afterglow of custom. They took for their own ideal the distillation from custom of its

essence -ends and laws which should be rigid and invariable. Thus Morals was set upon

the track which it dared not leave for nigh twenty-five hundred years: search for the

final good, and for the single moral force.

Aristotle's assertions that the state exists by nature, and that in the state alone does the

individual achieve independence and completeness of life, are indeed pregnant sayings.

But as uttered by Aristotle they meant that, in an isolated state, the Greek city-state, set

a garlanded island in the waste sea of barbaroi, a community indifferent when not

hostile to all other social groupings, individuals attain their full end. In a social unity

which signified social contraction, contempt, and antagonism, in a social order which

despised intercourse and glorified war, is realized the life of excellence!

(49) There is likewise a profound saying of Aristotle's that the individual who otherwise

than by accident is not a member of a state is either a brute or a god. But it is generally

forgotten that elsewhere Aristotle identified the highest excellence, the chief virtue, with

pure thought, and identifying this with the divine, isolated it in lonely grandeur from the

life of society. That man, so far as in him lay, should be godlike, meant that he should

be nonsocial, because supra-civic. Plato the idealist had shared the belief that reason is

the divine; but he was also a reformer and a radical and he would have those who

attained rational insight descend again into the civic cave, and in its obscurity labor

patiently for the enlightenment of its blear-eyed inhabitants. Aristotle, the conservative

and the definer of what is, gloried in the exaltation of intelligence in man above civic

excellence and social need; and thereby isolated the life of truest knowledge from

contact with social experience and from responsibility for discrimination of values in

the course of life.

Moral theory, however, accepted from social custom more than its cataleptic rigidity, its

exclusive area of common good, and its unfructified and irresponsible reason. The city-

state was a superficial layer of cultured citizens, cultured through a participation in

affairs made possible by relief from economic pursuits, superimposed upon the dense

( 50) mass of serfs, artisans, and laborers. For this division, moral philosophy made

itself spiritual sponsor, and thus took it up into its own being. Plato wrestled valiantly

with the class problem; but his outcome was the necessity of decisive demarcation, after

education, of the masses in whom reason was asleep and appetite much awake, from the

few who were fit to rule because alertly wise. The most generously imaginative soul of

all philosophy could not far outrun the institutional practices of his people and his times.

This might have warned his successors of the danger of deserting the sober path of a

critical discernment of the better and the worse within contemporary life for the more

exciting adventure of a final determination of absolute good and evil. It might have

taught the probability that some brute residuum or unrationalized social habit would be

erected into an apotheosis of pure reason. But the lesson was not learned. Aristotle

promptly yielded to the besetting sin of all philosophers, the idealization of the existent:

he declared that the class distinctions of superiority and inferiority as between man and

woman, master and slave, liberal-minded and base mechanic, exist and are justified by

nature-a nature which aims at embodied reason.

What, finally, is this Nature to which the philosophy of society and the individual so

bound itself? It is the nature which figures in Greek customs

(51) and myth; the nature resplendent and adorned which confronts us in Greek poetry

and art: the animism of savage man purged of grossness and generalized by unerring

esthetic taste into beauty and system. The myths had told of the loves and hates, the

caprices and desertions of the gods, and behind them all, inevitable Fate. Philosophy

translated these tales into formulae of the brute fluctuation of rapacious change held in

bounds by the final and supreme end: the rational good. The animism of the popular

mind died to reappear as cosmology.

Repeatedly in this course we have heard of sciences which began as parts of philosophy

and which gradually won their independence. Another statement of the same history is

that both science and philosophy began in subjection to mythological animism. Both

began with acceptance of a nature whose irregularities displayed the meaningless

variability of foolish wants held within the limits of order and uniformity by an

underlying movement toward a final and stable purpose. And when the sciences

gradually assumed the task of reducing irregular caprice to regular conjunction,

philosophy bravely took upon itself the task of substantiating, under the caption of a

spiritual view of the universe, the animistic survival. Doubtless Socrates brought

philosophy to earth; but his injunction to man to know himself was incredibly

(52) compromised in its execution by the fact that later philosophers submerged man in

the world to which philosophy was brought: a world which was the heavy and sunken

center of hierarchic heavens located in their purity and refinement as remotely as

possible from the gross and muddy vesture of earth.

The various limitations of Greek custom, its hostile indifference to all outside the

narrow city-state, its assumption of fixed divisions of wise and blind among men, its

inability socially to utilize science, its subordination of human intention to cosmic aim-

all of these things were worked into moral theory. Philosophy had no active hand in

producing the condition of barbarism in Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries.

By an unwitting irony which would have shocked none so much as the lucid moralists

of Athens, their philosophic idealization, under captions of Nature and Reason, of the

inherent limitations of Athenian society and Greek science, furnished the intellectual

tools for defining, standardizing, and justifying all the fundamental clefts and

antagonisms of feudalism. When practical conditions are not frozen in men's

imagination into crystalline truths, they are naturally fluid. They come and go. But

when intelligence fixes fluctuating circumstances into final ideals, petrifaction is likely

to occur; and philosophy gratuitously took upon itself the re-

( 53) -sponsibility for justifying the worst defects of barbarian Europe by showing their

necessary connection with divine reason.

The division of mankind into the two camps of the redeemed and the condemned had

not needed philosophy to produce it. But the Greek cleavage of men into separate kinds

on the basis of their position within or without the city-state was used to rationalize this

harsh intolerance. The hierarchic organization of feudalism, within church and state, of

those possessed of sacred rule and those whose sole excellence was obedience, did not

require moral theory to generate or explain it. But it took philosophy to furnish the

intellectual tools by which such chance episodes were emblazoned upon the cosmic

heavens as a grandiose spiritual achievement. No; it is all too easy to explain bitter

intolerance and desire for domination. Stubborn as they are, it was only when Greek

moral theory had put underneath them the distinction between the irrational and the

rational, between divine truth and good and corrupt and weak human appetite, that

intolerance on system and earthly domination for the sake of eternal excellence were

philosophically sanctioned. The health and welfare of the body and the securing for all

of a sure and a prosperous livelihood were not matters for which medieval conditions

fostered care in any case. But moral philosophy

( 54) was prevailed upon to damn the body on principle, and to relegate to

insignificance as merely mundane and temporal the problem of a just industrial order.

Circumstances of the times bore with sufficient hardness upon successful scientific

investigation; but philosophy added the conviction that in any case truth is so supernal

that it must be supernaturally revealed, and so important that it must be authoritatively

imparted and enforced. Intelligence was diverted from the critical consideration of the

natural sources and social consequences of better and worse into the channel of

metaphysical subtleties and systems, acceptance of which was made essential to

participation in the social order and in rational excellence. Philosophy bound the once

erect form of human endeavor and progress to the chariot wheels of cosmology and

theology.

Since the Renaissance, moral philosophy has repeatedly reverted to the Greek ideal of

natural excellence realized in social life, under the fostering care of intelligence in

action. The return, however, has taken place under the influence of democratic polity,

commercial expansion, and scientific reorganization. It has been a liberation more than

a reversion. This combined return and emancipation, having transformed our practice of

life in the last four centuries, will not be content till it has written itself clear in our

theory of that practice.

(55) Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be termed pragmatism or

be given the happier title of the applied and experimental habit of mind is of little

account. What is of moment is that intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation

at the remote edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good,

to take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore become responsible

to the practices that have generated it; the good be connected with nature, but with

nature naturally, not metaphysically, conceived, and social life be cherished in behalf of

its own immediate possibilities, not on the ground of its remote connections with a

cosmic reason and an absolute end.

There is a notion, more familiar than correct, that Greek thought sacrificed the

individual to the state. None has ever known better than the Greek that the individual

comes to himself and to his own only in association with others. But Greek thought

subjected, as we have seen, both state and individual to an external cosmic order; and

thereby it inevitably restricted the free use in doubt, inquiry, and experimentation, of the

human intelligence. The anima libera, the free mind of the sixteenth century, of Galileo

and his successors, was the counterpart of the disintegration of cosmology and its

animistic teleology. The lecturer on political economy reminded us that his subject

(56) began, in the Middle Ages, as a branch of ethics, though, as he hastened to show, it

soon got into better association. Well, the same company was once kept by all the

sciences, mathematical and physical as well as social. According to all accounts it was

the integrity of the number one and the rectitude of the square that attracted the attention

of Pythagoras to arithmetic and geometry as promising fields of study. Astronomy was

the projected picture book of a cosmic object lesson in morals, Dante's transcript of

which is none the less literal because poetic. If physics alone remained outside the

moral fold, while noble essences redeemed chemistry, occult forces blessed physiology,

and the immaterial soul exalted psychology, physics is the exception that proves the

rule: matter was so inherently immoral that no high-minded science would demean

itself by contact with it.

If we do not join with many in lamenting the stripping from nature of those idealistic

properties in which animism survived, if we do not mourn the secession of the sciences

from ethics, it is because the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and static moral

end was the necessary precondition of a free and progressive science of both things and

morals; because the emancipation of the sciences from ready made, remote, and abstract

values was necessary to make the sciences available for creating and maintaining more

and specific values here

( 57) and now. The divine comedy of modern medicine and hygiene is one of the human

epics yet to be written; but when composed it may prove no unworthy companion of the

medieval epic of other worldly beatific visions. The great ideas of the eighteenth

century, that expansive epoch of moral perception which ranks in illumination and

fervor along with classic Greek thought, the great ideas of the indefinitely continuous

progress of humanity and of the power and significance of freed intelligence, were

borne by a single mother-experimental inquiry.

The growth of industry and commerce is at once cause and effect of the growth in

science. Democritus and other ancients conceived the mechanical theory of the

universe. The notion was not only blank and repellent, because it ignored the rich social

material which Plato and Aristotle had organized into their rival idealistic views; but it

was scientifically sterile, a piece of dialectics. Contempt for machines as the

accouterments of despised mechanics kept the mechanical conception aloof from these

specific and controllable experiences which alone could fructify it. This conception,

then, like the idealistic, was translated into a speculative cosmology and thrown like a

vast net around the universe at large, as if to keep it from coming to pieces. It is from

respect for the lever, the pulley, and the screw that modern experimental

(58) and mathematical mechanics derives itself. Motion, traced through the workings of

a machine, was followed out into natural events and studied just as motion, not as a

poor yet necessary device for realizing final causes. So studied, it was found to be

available for new machines and new applications, which in creating new ends also

promoted new wants, and thereby stimulated new activities, new discoveries, and new

inventions. The recognition that natural energy can be systematically applied, through

experimental observation, to the satisfaction and multiplication of concrete wants is

doubtless the greatest single discovery ever imported into the life of man-save perhaps

the discovery of language. Science, borrowing from industry, repaid the debt with

interest, and has made the control of natural forces for the aims of life so inevitable that

for the first time man is relieved from overhanging fear, with its wolflike scramble to

possess and accumulate, and is freed to consider the more gracious question of securing

to all an ample and liberal life. The industrial life had been condemned by Greek

exaltation of abstract thought and by Greek contempt for labor, as representing the brute

struggle of carnal appetite for its own satiety. The industrial movement, offspring of

science, restored it to its central position in morals. When Adam Smith made economic

activity the moving spring of man's unremitting effort, from

(59) the cradle to the grave, to better his own lot, he recorded this change. And when he

made sympathy the central spring in man's conscious moral endeavor, he reported the

effect which the increasing intercourse of men, due primarily to commerce, had in

breaking down suspicion and jealousy and in liberating man's kindlier impulses.

Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so much an addition to the

scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of their social or spiritual

meaning. Democracy is an absurdity where faith in the individual as individual is

impossible; and this faith is impossible when intelligence is regarded as a cosmic

power, not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies. It is also impossible

when appetites and desires are conceived to be the dominant factor in the constitution of

most men's characters, and when appetite and desire are conceived to be manifestations

of the disorderly and unruly principle of nature. To put the intellectual center of gravity

in the objective cosmos, outside of men's own experiments and tests, and then to invite

the application of individual intelligence to the determination of society, is to invite

chaos. To hold that want is mere negative flux and hence requires external fixation by

reason, and then to invite the wants to give free play to themselves in social

construction and intercourse, is to call down anarchy. Democ

( 60) -racy is estimable only through the changed conception of intelligence, that forms

modern science, and of want, that forms modern industry. It is essentially a changed

psychology. The substitution, for a priori truth and deduction, of fluent doubt and

inquiry meant trust in human nature in the concrete; in individual honesty, curiosity, and

sympathy. The substitution of moving commerce for fixed custom meant a view of

wants as the dynamics of social progress, not as the pathology of private greed. The

nineteenth century indeed turned sour on that somewhat complacent optimism in which

the eighteenth century rested: the ideas that the intelligent self-love of individuals would

conduce to social cohesion, and competition among individuals usher in the kingdom of

social welfare. But the conception of a social harmony of interests in which the

achievement by each individual of his own freedom should contribute to a like

perfecting of the powers of all, through a fraternally organized society, is the permanent

contribution of the industrial movement to morals -even though so far it be but the

contribution of a problem.

Intellectually speaking, the centuries since the fourteenth are the true middle ages. They

mark the transitional period of mental habit, as the so-called medieval period represents

the petrifaction, under changed outward conditions, of Greek ideas.

( 61) The conscious articulation of genuinely modern tendencies has yet to come, and

till it comes the ethic of our own life must remain undescribed. But the system of morals

which has come nearest to the reflection of the movements of science, democracy, and

commerce, is doubtless the utilitarian. Scientific, after the modern mode, it certainly

would be. Newton's influence dyes deep the moral thought of the eighteenth century.

The arrangements of the solar system had been described in terms of a homogeneous

matter and motion, worked by two opposed and compensating forces: all because a

method of analysis, of generalization by analogy, and of mathematical deduction back

to new empirical details had been followed. The imagination of the eighteenth century

was a Newtonian imagination; and this no less in social than in physical matters. Hume

proclaims that morals is about to become an experimental science. Just as, almost in our

own day, Mill's interest in a method for social science led him to reformulate the logic

of experimental inquiry, so all the great men of the Enlightenment were in search for the

organon of morals which should repeat the physical triumphs of Newton. Bentham

notes that physics has had its Bacon and Newton; that morals has had its Bacon in

Helv�tius, but still awaits its Newton; and he leaves us in no doubt that at the moment

of writing he was ready, modestly but

(62) firmly, to fill the waiting niche with its missing figure.

The industrial movement furnished the concrete imagery for this ethical renovation. The

utilitarians borrowed from Adam Smith the notion that through industrial exchange in a

free society the individual pursuing his own good is led, under the guidance of the "

invisible hand," to promote the general good more effectually than if he had set out to

do it. This idea was dressed out in the atomistic psychology which Hartley built out

from Locke-and was returned at usurious rates to later economists.

From the great French writers who had sought to justify and promote democratic

individualism, .came the conception that, since it is perverted political institutions

which deprave individuals and bring them into hostility, nation against nation, class

against class, individual against individual, the great political problem is such a reform

of law and legislation, civil and criminal, of administration, and of education as will

force the individual to find his own interests in pursuits conducing to the welfare of

others.

Tremendously effective as a tool of criticism, operative in abolition and elimination,

utilitarianism failed to measure up to the constructive needs of the time. Its theoretical

equalization of the good of each with that of every other was practically

( 63) perverted by its excessive interest in the middle and manufacturing classes. Its

speculative defect of an atomistic psychology combined with this narrowness of vision

to make light of the constructive work that needs to be done by the state, before all can

have, otherwise than in name, an equal chance to count in the common good. Thus the

age-long subordination of economics to politics was revenged in the submerging of both

politics and ethics in a narrow theory of economic profit; and utilitarianism, in its

orthodox descendants, proffered the disjointed pieces of a mechanism, with a

monotonous reiteration that looked at aright they form a beautifully harmonious

organism.

Prevision, and to some extent experience, of this failure, conjoined with differing social

traditions and ambitions, evoked German idealism, the transcendental morals of Kant

and his successors. German thought strove to preserve the traditions which bound

culture to the past, while revising these traditions to render them capable of meeting

novel conditions. It found weapons at hand in the conceptions borrowed by Roman law

from Stoic philosophy, and in the conceptions by which Protestant humanism had re-

edited scholastic Catholicism. Grotius had made the idea of natural law, natural right

and obligation, the central idea of German morals, as thoroughly as Locke had made the

individual desire for liberty and happiness the

( 64) focus of English and then of French speculation. Materialized idealism is the

happy monstrosity in which the popular demand for vivid imagery is most easily

reconciled with the equally strong demand for supremacy of moral values; and the

complete idealistic materialism of Stoicism has always given its ideas a practical

influence out of all proportion to their theoretical vogue as a system. To the Protestant,

that is the German, humanist, Natural Law, the bond of harmonious reason in nature,

the spring of social intercourse among men, the inward light of individual conscience,

united Cicero, St. Paul, and Luther in blessed union; gave a rational, not superrational

basis for morals, and provided room for social legislation which at the same time could

easily be held back from too ruthless application to dominant class interests.

Kant saw the mass of empirical and hence irrelevant detail that had found refuge within

this liberal and diffusive reason. He saw that the idea of reason could be made self-

consistent only by stripping it naked of these empirical accretions. He then provided, in

his critiques, a somewhat cumbrous moving van for transferring the resultant pure or

naked reason out of nature and the objective world, and for locating it in new quarters,

with a new stock of goods and new customers. The new quarters were particular

subjects, individuals;

(65) the stock of goods were the forms of perception and the functions of thought by

which empirical flux is woven into durable fabrics; the new customers were a society of

individuals in which all are ends in themselves. There ought to be an injunction issued

that Kant's saying about Humes awakening of him should not be quoted save in

connection with his other saying that Rousseau brought him to himself, in teaching him

that the philosopher is of less account than the laborer in the fields unless he contributes

to human freedom. But none the less, the new tenant, the universal reason, and the old

homestead, the empirical tumultuous individual, could not get on together. Reason

became a mere voice which, having nothing in particular to say, said Law, Duty, in

general, leaving to the existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great the

congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory in the concrete. The marriage of

freedom and authority was thus celebrated with the understanding that sentimental

primacy went to the former and practical control to the latter.

The effort to force a universal reason that had been used to the broad domains of the

cosmos into the cramped confines of individuality conceived as merely " empirical," a

highly particularized creature of sense, could have but one result: an explosion. The

products of that explosion constitute the Post-Kantian philosophies. It was the work of

(66) Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of Kant with the concrete contents of

history. The voice sounded like the voice of Aristotle, Thomas of Aquino, and Spinoza

translated into Swabian German; but the hands were as the hands of Montesquieu,

Herder, Condorcet, and the rising historical school. The outcome was the assertion that

history is reason, and reason is history: the actual is rational, the rational is the actual. It

gave the pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not strenuously discourage) of being

specifically an idealization of the Prussian nation, and incidentally a systematized

apologetic for the universe at large,. But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted the

idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed ends, and presented the social and

moral order, as well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming, and it located reason

somewhere within the struggles of life.

Unstable equilibrium, rapid fermentation, and a succession of explosive reports are thus

the chief notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and traditionalism, empiricism and

rationalism, crude naturalisms and all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by side all the

more flourish, one suspects, because side by side. Spencer exults because natural

science reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is carrying us automatically to

the goal of perfect man in perfect society; and his English idealistic

( 67) contemporary, Green, is so disturbed by the removal from nature of its moral

qualities, that he tries to show that this makes no difference, since nature in any case is

constituted and known through a spiritual principle which is as permanent as nature is

changing. An Amiel genteelly laments the decadence of the inner life, while his

neighbor Nietzsche brandishes in rude ecstasy the banner of brute survival as a happy

omen of the final victory of nobility of mind. The reasonable conclusion from such a

scene is that there is taking place a transformation of attitude towards moral theory

rather than mere propagation of varieties among theories. The classic theories all agreed

in one regard. They all alike assumed the existence of the end, the summum bonum, the

final goal; and of the separate moral force that moves to that goal. Moralists have

disputed as to whether the end is an aggregate of pleasurable state of consciousness,

enjoyment of the divine essence, acknowledgment of the law of duty, or conformity to

environment. So they have disputed as to the path by which the final goal is to be

reached: fear or benevolence? reverence for pure law or pity for others? self-love or

altruism? But these very controversies implied that there was but the one end and the

one means.

The transformation in attitude, to which I referred, is the growing belief that the proper

busi-

( 68) -ness of intelligence is discrimination of multiple and present goods and of the

varied immediate means of their realization; not search for the one remote aim. The

progress of biology has accustomed our minds to the notion that intelligence is not an

outside power presiding supremely but statically over the desires and efforts of man, but

is a method of adjustment of capacities and conditions within specific situations.

History, as the lecturer on that subject told us, has discovered itself in the idea of

process. The genetic standpoint makes us aware that the systems of the past are neither

fraudulent impostures nor absolute revelations; but are the products of political,

economic, and scientific conditions whose change carries with it change of theoretical

formulations. The recognition that intelligence is properly an organ of adjustment in

difficult situations makes us aware that past theories were of value so far as they helped

carry to an issue the social perplexities from which they emerged. But the chief impact

of the evolutionary method is upon the present. Theory having learned what it cannot

do, is made responsible for the better performance of what needs to be done, and what

only a broadly equipped intelligence can undertake: study of the conditions out of which

come the obstacles and the resources of adequate life, and developing and testing the

ideas that, as working hypotheses, may be used to dimin-

(69) -ish the causes of evil and to buttress and expand the sources of good. This

program is indeed vague, but only unfamiliarity with it could lead one to the conclusion

that it is less vague than the idea that there is a single moral ideal and a single moral

motive force.

From this point of view there is no separate body of moral rules; no separate system of

motive powers; no separate subject-matter of moral knowledge, and hence no such thing

as an isolated ethical science. If the business of morals is not to speculate upon man's

final end and upon an ultimate standard of right, it is to utilize physiology,

anthropology, and psychology to discover all that can be discovered of man, his organic

powers and propensities. If its business is not to search for the one separate moral

motive, it is to converge all the instrumentalities of the social arts, of law, education,

economics, and political science upon the construction of intelligent methods of

improving the common lot.

If we still wish to make our peace with the past, and to sum up the plural and changing

goods of life in a single word, doubtless the term happiness is the one most apt. But we

should again exchange free morals for sterile metaphysics, if we imagine that "

happiness " is any less unique than the individuals who experience it; any less complex

than the constitution of their capacities, or any less

( 70) variable than the objects upon which their capacities are directed.

To many timid, albeit sincere, souls of an earlier century, the ' decay of the doctrine that

all true and worthful science is knowledge of final causes seemed fraught with danger to

science and to morals. The rival conception of a wide open universe, a universe without

bounds in time or space, without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the lid

off, was a menace. We now face in moral science a similar crisis and like opportunity,

as well as share in a like dreadful suspense. 'The abolition of a fixed and final goal and

causal force in nature did not, as matter of fact, render rational conviction less important

or less attainable. It was accompanied by the provision of a technique of persistent and

detailed inquiry in all special fields of fact, a technique which led to the detection of

unsuspected forces and the revelation of undreamed of uses. In like fashion we may

anticipate that the abolition of the final goal and the single motive power and the

separate and infallible faculty in morals, will quicken inquiry into the diversity of

specific goods of experience, fix attention upon their conditions, and bring to light

values now dim and obscure. The change may relieve men from responsibility for what

they cannot do, but it will promote thoughtful consideration of what they may do and

the definition of responsibility for what

(71) they do amiss because of failure to think straight and carefully. Absolute goods will

fall into the background, but the question of making more sure and extensive the share

of all men in natural and social goods will be urgent, a problem not to be escaped nor

evaded.

Morals, philosophy, returns to its first love; love of the wisdom that is nurse, as nature is

mother, of good. But it returns to the Socratic principle equipped with a multitude of

special methods of inquiry and testing; with an organized mass of knowledge, and with

control of the arrangements by which industry, law, and education may concentrate

upon the problem of the participation by all men and women, up to their capacity of

absorption, in all attained values. Morals may then well leave to poetry and to art, the

task (so unartistically performed by philosophy since Plato) of gathering together and

rounding out, into one abiding picture, the separate and special goods of life. It may

leave this task with the assurance that the resultant synthesis will not depict any final

and all-inclusive good, but will add just one more specific good to the enjoyable

excellencies of life.

Humorous irony shines through most of the harsh glances turned towards the idea of an

experimental basis and career for morals. Some shiver in the fear that morals will be

plunged into anarchic confusion-a view well expressed by a

(72) recent writer in the saying that if the a priori and transcendental basis of morals be

abandoned " we shall have merely the same certainty that now exists in physics and

chemistry "! Elsewhere lurks the apprehension that the progress of scientific method

will deliver the purposive freedom of man bound hand and foot to the fatal decrees of

iron necessity, called natural law. The notion that laws govern and forces rule is an

animistic survival. It is a product of reading nature in terms of politics in order to turn

around and then read politics in the light of supposed sanctions of nature. This idea

passed from medieval theology into the science of Newton, to whom the universe was

the dominion of a sovereign whose laws were the laws of nature. From Newton it

passed into the deism of the eighteenth century, whence it migrated into the philosophy

of the Enlightenment, to make its last stand in' Spencer's philosophy of the fixed

environment and the static goal.

No, nature is not an unchangeable order, unwinding itself majestically from the reel of

law under the control of deified forces. It is an indefinite congeries of changes. Laws are

not governmental regulations which limit change, but are convenient formulations of

selected portions of change followed through a longer or shorter period of time, and

then registered in statistical forms that are amenable to mathematical manipulation.

( 73) That this device of shorthand symbolization presages the subjection of man's

intelligent effort to fixity of law and environment is interesting as a culture survival, but

is not important for moral theory. Savage and child delight in creating bogeys from

which, their origin and structure being conveniently concealed, interesting thrills and

shudders may be had. Civilized man in the nineteenth century outdid these bugaboos in

his image of a fixed universe hung on a cast-iron framework of fixed, necessary, and

universal laws. Knowledge of nature does not mean subjection to predestination, but

insight into courses of change; an insight which is formulated in " laws," that is,

methods of subsequent procedure.

Knowledge of the process and conditions of physical and social change through

experimental science and genetic history has one result with a double name: increase of

control, and increase of responsibility; increase of power to direct natural change, and

increase of responsibility for its equitable direction toward fuller good. Theory located

within progressive practice instead of reigning statically supreme over it, means practice

itself made responsible to intelligence; to intelligence which relentlessly scrutinizes the

consequences of every practice, and which exacts liability by an equally relentless

publicity. As long as morals occupies itself with mere ideals, forces and conditions as

they

( 74) are will be good enough for " practical" men, since they are then left free to their

own devices in turning these to their own account. As long as moralists plume

themselves upon possession of the domain of the categorical imperative with its bare

precepts, men of executive habits will always be at their elbows to regulate the concrete

social conditions through which the form of law gets its actual filling of specific

injunctions. When freedom is conceived to be transcendental, the coercive restraint of

immediate necessity will lay its harsh hand upon the mass of men.

In the end, men do what they can do. They refrain from doing what they cannot do. they

do what their own specific powers in conjunction with the limitations and resources of

the environment permit. The effective control of their powers is not through precepts,

but through the regulation of their conditions. If this regulation is to be not merely

physical or coercive, but moral, it must consist of the intelligent selection and

determination of the environments in which we act; and in an intelligent exaction of

responsibility for the use of men's powers. Theorists inquire after the " motive " to

morality, to virtue and the good, under such circumstances. What then, one wonders, is

their conception of the make-up of human nature and of its relation to virtue and to

goodness? The pessimism that dictates such a ques-

(75) -tion, if it be justified, precludes any consideration of morals.

The diversion of intelligence from discrimination of plural and concrete goods, from

noting their conditions and obstacles, and from devising methods for holding men

responsible for their concrete use of powers and conditions, has done more than brute

love of power to establish inequality and injustice among men. It has done more,

because it has confirmed with social sanctions the principle of feudal domination. All

men require moral sanctions in their conduct: the consent of their kind Not getting it

otherwise, they go insane to feign it. No man ever lived with the exclusive approval of

his own conscience. Hence the vacuum left in practical matters by the remote

irrelevancy of transcendental morals has to be filled in somehow. It is filled in. It is

filled in with class-codes, class-standards, class-approvals -with codes which

recommend the practices and habits already current in a given circle, set, calling,

profession, trade, industry, club, or gang. These class-codes always lean back upon and

support themselves by the professed ideal code. This latter meets them more than half-

way. Being in its pretense a theory for regulating practice, it must demonstrate its

practicability. It is uneasy in isolation, and travels hastily to meet with compromise and

accommodation the actual situation in all its brute

(76) unrationality. Where the pressure is greatest in the habitual practice of the political

and economic chieftains-there it accommodates the most.

Class-codes of morals are sanctions, under the caption of ideals, of uncriticised

customs; they are recommendations, under the head of duties, of what the members of

the class are already most given to doing. If there are to obtain more equable and

comprehensive principles of action, exacting a more impartial exercise of natural power

and resource in the interests of a common good, members of a class must no longer rest

content in responsibility to a class whose traditions constitute its conscience, but be

made responsible to a society whose conscience is its free and effectively organized

intelligence.

In such a conscience alone will the Socratic injunction to man to know himself be

fulfilled.

Notes

1. A public lecture delivered at Columbia University in March, 1908, under the

title of "Ethics," in a series of lectures on " Science, Philosophy, and Art."

Reprinted from a monograph published by the Columbia University Press.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910b/Dewey_1910_04.html

[Bajado el 23 de agosto de 2011]

Originally published as:

John Dewey. "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge", Chapter 4 in The Influence of

Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1910) :

77 - 111.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays

Chapter 4: The Experimental Theory of Knowledge[1]

Table of Contents | Next | Previous

IT should be possible to discern and describe a knowing as one identifies any object,

concern, or event. It must have its own marks; it must offer characteristic features-as

much so as a thunder-storm, the constitution of a State, or a leopard. In the search for

this affair, we are first of all desirous for something which is for itself,

contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, not something called knowledge by

another and from without-whether this other be logician, psychologist, or

epistemologist. The " knowledge " may turn out false, and hence no knowledge; but this

is an after-affair; it may prove to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this outcome be

only wisdom after the event, it does not concern us. What we want is just something

which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or wrongly.

(78)

I

This means a specific case, a sample. Yet instances are proverbially dangerous-so

na�vely and graciously may they beg the questions at issue. Our recourse is to an

example so simple, so much on its face as to be as innocent as may be of assumptions.

This case we shall gradually complicate, mindful at each step to state just what new

elements are introduced. Let us suppose a smell, just a floating odor. This odor may be

anchored by supposing that it moves to action; it starts changes that end in picking and

enjoying a rose. This description is intended to apply to the course of events witnessed

and recounted from without. What sort of a course must it be to constitute a knowledge,

or to have somewhere within its career that which deserves this title? The smell,

imprimis, is there; the movements that it excites are there; the final plucking and

gratification are experienced. But, let us say, the smell is not the smell o f the rose; the

resulting change of the organism is not a sense of walking and reaching; the delicious

finale is not the fulfilment of the movement, and, through that, of the original smell; " is

not,'-' in each case meaning is `4 not experienced as " such. We may take, in short, these

experiences in a brutely serial fashion. The smell, S, is replaced (and displaced) by a felt

movement, K, this is re-

(79) -placed by the gratification, G. Viewed from without, as we are now regarding it,

there is S-K-G. But from within, for itself, it is now S, now K, now G, and so on to the

end of the chapter. Nowhere is there looking before and after; memory and anticipation

are not born. Such an experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge, nor does it

exercise a cognitive function.

Here, however, we may be halted. If there is anything present in " consciousness " at all,

we may be told (at least we constantly are so told) there must be knowledge of it as

present present, at all events, in " consciousness." There is, so it is argued, knowledge at

least of a simple apprehensive type, knowledge of the acquaintance order, knowledge

that, even though not knowledge what. The smell, it is admitted, does not know about

anything else, nor is anything known about the smell (the same thing, perhaps) ; but the

smell is known, either by itself, or by the mind, or by some subject, some unwinking,

unremitting eye. No, we must reply; there is no apprehension without some (however

slight) context; no acquaintance which is not either recognition or expectation.

Acquaintance is presence honored with an escort; presence is introduced as familiar, or

an associate springs up to greet it. Acquaintance always implies a little friendliness; a

trace of re-knowing, of

( 80) anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to follow.

This claim cannot be dismissed as trivial. If valid, it carries with it the distance between

being and knowing: and the recognition of an element of mediation, that is, of art, in all

knowledge. This disparity, this transcendence, is not something which holds of our

knowledge, of finite knowledge, just marking the gap between our type of

consciousness and some other with which we may contrast it after the manner of the

agnostic or the transcendentalist (who hold so much property in joint ownership!), but

exists because knowing is knowing, that way of bringing things to bear upon things

which we call reflection-a manipulation of things experienced in the light one of

another.

"Feeling," I read in a recent article, " feeling is immediately acquainted with its own

quality, with its own subjective being."[2] How and whence this duplication in the

inwards of feeling into feel

( 81) -ing the knower and feeling the known? into feeling as being and feeling as

acquaintance? Let us frankly deny such monsters. Feeling is its own quality; is its own

specific (whence and why, once more, subjective?) being. If this statement be

dogmatism, it is at least worth insistent declaration, were it only by way of counter-

irritant to that other dogmatism which asserts that being in " consciousness " is always

presence for or in knowledge. So let us repeat once more, that to be a smell (or anything

else) is one thing, to be known as smell, another; to be a " feeling " one thing, to be

known as a " feeling " another.[3] The first is thinghood ; existence indubitable, direct;

in this way all things are that are in "consciousness" at all.[4] The second is reflected

being, things indicating and calling for other things-something offering the possibility

of truth and hence of falsity. The first is

(82) genuine immediacy; the second is (in the instance discussed) a pseudo-immediacy,

which in the same breath that it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in another term (and

one which is unexperienced both in itself and in its relation) the subject or "

consciousness," to which the immediate is related.[5]

But we need not remain with dogmatic assertions. To be acquainted with a thing or with

a person has a definite empirical meaning; we have only to call to mind what it is to be

genuinely and empirically acquainted, to have done forever with this uncanny presence

which, though bare and simple presence, is yet known, and thus is clothed upon and

complicated. To be acquainted with a thing is to be assured (from the standpoint of the

experience itself ) that it is of such and such a character; that it will behave, if given an

opportunity, in such and such a way; that the obviously and flagrantly present trait is

associated with fellow traits that will show themselves, if the leadings of the present

trait are followed out. To be

( 83) acquainted is to anticipate to some extent, on the basis of prior experience. I am,

say, barely acquainted with Mr. Smith: then I have no extended body of associated

qualities along with those palpably present, but at least some one suggested trait occurs;

his nose, his tone of voice, the place where I saw him, his calling in life, an interesting

anecdote about him, etc. To be acquainted is to know what a thing is like in some

particular. If one is acquainted with the smell of a flower it means that the smell is not

just smell, but reminds one of some other experienced thing which stands in continuity

with the smell. There is thus supplied a condition of control over or purchase upon what

is present, the possibility of translating it into terms of some other trait not now sensibly

present.

Let us return to our example. Let us suppose that S is not just displaced by K and then

by G. Let us suppose it persists; and persists not as an unchanged S alongside K and G,

nor yet as fused with them into a new further quale J. For in such events, we have only

the type already considered and rejected. For an observer the new quale might be more

complex, or fuller of meaning, than the original S, K, or G, but might not be

experienced as complex. We might thus suppose a composite photograph which should

suggest nothing of the complexity of its origin and structure. In this case we should

have simply another picture.

( 84)

But we may also suppose that the blur of the photograph suggests the superimposition

of pictures and something of their character. Then we get another, and for our problem,

much more fruitful kind of persistence. We will imagine that the final G assumes this

form: Gratification-terminating-movement-induced-by-smell. The smell is still present;

it has persisted. It is not present in its original form, but is represented with a quality, an

office, that of having excited activity and thereby terminating its career in a certain

quale of gratification. It is not S, but S ; that is S with an increment of meaning due to

maintenance and fulfilment through a process. S is no longer just smell, but smell which

has excited and thereby secured.

Here we have a cognitive, but not a cognitional thing. In saying that the smell is finally

experienced as meaning gratification (through intervening handling, seeing, etc.) and

meaning it not in a hapless way, but in a fashion which operates to effect what is meant,

we retrospectively attribute intellectual force and function to the smell-and this is what

is signified by " cognitive." Yet the smell is not cognitional, because it did not

knowingly intend to mean this; but is found, after the event, to have meant it. Nor again

is the final experience, the S or transformed S, a knowledge.

Here again the statement may be challenged.

(85) Those who agree with the denial that bare presence of a quale in "consciousness"

constitutes acquaintance and simple apprehension, may now turn against us, saying that

experience of fulfilment of meaning is just what we mean by knowledge, and this is just

what the S of our illustration is. The point is fundamental. As the smell at first was

presence or being, less than knowing, so the fulfilment is an experience that is more

than knowing. Seeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full meaning of the smell as

the odor of just this beautiful thing, is not knowledge because it is more than

knowledge.

As this may seem dogmatic, let us suppose that the fulfilment, the realization,

experience, is a knowledge. Then how shall it be distinguished from and yet classed

with other things called knowledge, viz., reflective, discursive cognitions? Such

knowledges are what they are precisely because they are not fulfilments, but intentions,

aims, schemes, symbols of overt fulfilment. Knowledge, perceptual and conceptual, of a

hunting dog is prerequisite in order that I may really hunt with the hounds. The hunting

in turn may increase my knowledge of dogs and their whys. Rut the knowledge of the

dog, qua knowledge, remains characteristically marked off from the use of that

knowledge in the fulfilment experience, the hunt. The hunt is a realization of

knowledge; it alone, if you please, verifies, vali-

(86) -dates, knowledge, or supplies tests of truth. The prior knowledge of the dog, was,

if you wish, hypothetical, lacking in assurance or categorical certainty. The hunting, the

fulfilling, realizing experience alone gives knowledge, because it alone completely

assures; makes faith good in works.

Now there is and can be no objection to this definition of knowledge, provided it is

consistently adhered to. One has as much right to identify knowledge with complete

assurance, as I have to identify it with anything else. Considerable justification in the

common use of language, in common sense, may be found for defining knowledge as

complete assurance. But even upon this definition, the fulfilling experience is not, as

such, complete assurance, and hence not a knowledge. Assurance, cognitive validation,

and guaranteeship, follow from it, but are not coincident with its occurrence. It gives,

but is not, assurance. The concrete construction of a story, the manipulation of a

machine, the hunting with the dogs, is not, so far as it is fulfilment, a confirmation of

meanings previously entertained as cognitional; that is, is not contemporaneously

experienced as such. To think of prior schemes, symbols, meanings, as fulfilled in a

subsequent experience, is reflectively to present in their relations to one another both the

meanings and the experiences in which they are, as a matter of fact, embodied. This

reflective at-

( 87) -titude cannot be identical with the fulfilment experience itself; it occurs only in

retrospect when the worth of the meanings, or cognitive ideas, is critically inspected in

the light of their fulfilment; or it occurs as an interruption of the fulfilling experience.

The hunter stops his hunting as a fulfilment to reflect that he made a mistake in his idea

of his dog, or again, that his dog is everything he thought he was that his notion of him

is confirmed. Or, the man stops the actual construction of his machine and turns back

upon his plan in correction or in admiring estimate of its value. The fulfilling experience

is not of itself knowledge, then, even if we identify knowledge with fulness of assurance

or guarantee. Moreover it gives, affords, assurance only in reference to a situation which

we have not yet considered.[6]

Before the category of confirmation or refutation can be introduced, there must be

something which means to mean something and which therefore can be guaranteed or

nullified by the issue- and this is precisely what we have not as yet found. We must

return to our instance and introduce a further complication. Let us suppose that the

smell quale recurs at a later date, and that it recurs neither as the original S nor yet as the

( 88) final S, but as an S' which is fated or charged with the sense of the possibility of a

fulfilment like unto S. The S' that recurs is aware of something else which it means,

which it intends to effect through an operation incited by it and without which its own

presence is abortive, and, so to say, unjustified, senseless. Now we have an experience

which is cognitional, not merely cognitive; which is contemporaneously aware of

meaning something beyond itself, instead of having this meaning ascribed by another at

a later period. The odor knows the rose; the rose is known by the odor; and the import

of each term is constituted by the relationship in which it stands to the other. That is, the

import of the smell is the indicating and demanding relation which it sustains to the

enjoyment of the rose as its fulfilling experience; while this enjoyment is just the

content or definition of what the smell consciously meant, i.e., meant to mean. Both the

thing meaning and the thing meant are elements in the same situation. Both are present,

but both are not present in the same way. In fact, one is present as-not-present-in-the-

same-way-in-which-the-other-is. It is present as something to be rendered present in the

same way through the intervention of an operation. We must not balk at a purely verbal

difficulty. It suggests a verbal inconsistency to speak of a thing present-as-absent. But

all ideal contents,

(89) all aims (that is, things aimed at) are present in just such fashion. Things can be

presented as absent, just as they can be presented as hard or soft, black or white, six

inches or fifty rods away from the body. The assumption that an ideal content must be

either totally absent, or else present in just the same fashion as it will be when it is

realized, is not only dogmatic, but self-contradictory. The only way in which an ideal

content can be experienced at all is to be presented as not-present-in-the-same-way in

which something else is present, the latter kind of presence affording the standard or

type of satisfactory presence. When present in the same way it ceases to be an ideal

content. Not a contrast of bare existence over against non-existence, or of present

consciousness over against reality out of present consciousness, but of a satisfactory

with an unsatisfactory mode of presence makes the difference between the " really " and

the " ideally " present.

In terms of our illustration, handling and enjoying the rose are present, but they are not

present in the same way that the smell is present. They are present as going to be there

in the same way, through an operation which the smell stands sponsor for. The situation

is inherently an uneasy one-one in which everything hangs upon the performance of the

operation indicated; upon the adequacy of movement as a connecting

(90) link, or real adjustment of the thing meaning and the thing meant. Generalizing

from the instance, we get the following definition: An experience is a knowledge, if in

its quale there is an experienced distinction and connection of two elements of the

following sort: one means or intends the presence of the other in the same fashion in

which itself is already present, while the other is that which, while not present in the

same fashion, must become so present if the meaning or intention of its companion or

yoke-fellow is to be fulfilled through the operation it sets up.

II

We now return briefly to the question of knowledge as acquaintance, and at greater

length to that of knowledge as assurance, or as fulfilment which confirms and validates.

With the recurrence of the odor as meaning something beyond itself, there is

apprehension, knowledge that. One may now say I know what a rose smells like; or I

know what this smell is like; I am acquainted with the rose's agreeable odor. In short, on

the basis of a present quality, the odor anticipates and forestalls some further trait.

We have also the conditions of knowledge of the confirmation and refutation type. In

the working out of the situation just described, in the trans-

(91)- formation, self-indicated and self-demanded, of the tensional into a harmonious or

satisfactory situation, fulfilment or disappointment results. The odor either does or does

not fulfil itself in the rose. The smell as intention is borne out by the facts, or is

nullified. As has already been pointed out, the subsequent experience of the fulfilment

type is not primarily a confirmation or refutation. Its import is too vital, too urgent to be

reduced in itself just to the value of testing an intention or meaning.[7] But it gets in

reflection just such verificatory significance. If the smell's intention is unfulfilled, the

discrepancy may throw one back, in reflection, upon the original situation. Interesting

developments then occur. The smell meant a rose; and yet it did not (so it turns out)

mean a rose; it meant another flower, or something, one can't just tell what. Clearly

there is something

(92) else which enters in; something else beyond the odor as it was first experienced

determined the validity of its meaning. Here then, perhaps, we have a transcendental, as

distinct from an experimental reference? Only if this something else makes no

difference, or no detectable difference, in the smell itself. If the utmost observation and

reflection can find no difference in the smell quales that fail and those that succeed in

executing their intentions, then there is an outside controlling and disturbing factor,

which, since it is outside of the situation, can never be utilized in knowledge, and hence

can never be employed in any concrete testing or verifying. In this case, knowing

depends upon an extra-experimental or transcendental factor. But this very

transcendental quality makes both confirmation and refutation, correction, criticism, of

the pretensions or meanings of things, impossible. For the conceptions of truth and

error, we must, upon the transcendental basis, substitute those of accidental success or

failure. Sometimes the intention chances upon one, sometimes upon another. Why or

how, the gods only know-and they only if to them the extra-experimental factor is not

extra-experimental, but makes a concrete difference in the concrete smell. But

fortunately the situation is not one to be thus described. The factor that determines the

success or failure, does institute a difference in the thing

(93) which means the object, and this difference is detectable, once attention, through

failure, has been called to the need of its discovery. At the very least, it makes this

difference: the smell is infected with an element of uncertainty of meaning-and this as a

part of the thing experienced, not for an observer. This additional awareness at least

brings about an additional wariness. Meaning is more critical, and operation more

cautious.

But we need not stop here. Attention may be fully directed to the subject of smells.

Smells may become the object of knowledge. They may take, pro tempore,[8] the place

which the rose formerly occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in which odors

mean other things than just roses, may voluntarily produce new cases for the sake of

further inspection, and thus account for the cases where meanings had been falsified in

the issue; discriminate more carefully the peculiarities of those meanings which the

event verified, and thus safeguard and bulwark to some extent the employing of similar

meanings in the future. Superficially, it may then seem as if odors were treated after the

fashion of Locke's simple ideas,

( 94) or Humes "distinct ideas which are separate existences." Smells apparently assume

an independent, isolated status during this period of investigation. " Sensations," as the

laboratory psychologist and the analytic psychologist generally studies them, are

examples of just such detached things. But egregious error results if we forget that this

seeming isolation and detachment is the outcome of a deliberate scientific device-that it

is simply a part of the scientific technique of an inquiry directed upon securing tested

conclusions. Just and only because odors (or any group of qualities) are parts of a

connected world are they signs of things beyond themselves; and only because they are

signs is it profitable and necessary to study them as if f they were complete, self-

enclosed entities.

In the reflective determination of things with reference to their specifically meaning

other things, experiences of fulfilment, disappointment, and going astray inevitably play

an important and recurrent r�le. They also are realistic facts, related in realistic ways to

the things that intend to mean other things and to the things intended. When these

fulfilments and refusals are reflected upon in the determinate relations in which they

stand to their relevant meanings, they obtain a quality which is quite lacking to them in

their immediate occurrence as just fulfilments or disappointments; viz.,

( 95) the property of affording assurance and correction of confirming and refuting.

Truth and falsity are not properties of any experience or thing, in and of itself or in its

first intention; but of things where the problem of assurance consciously enters in. Truth

and falsity present themselves as significant facts only in situations in which specific

meanings and their already experienced fulfilments and non-fulfilments are

intentionally compared and contrasted zenith reference to the question of the worth, as

to reliability of meaning, of the given meaning or class of meanings. Like knowledge

itself, truth is an experienced relation of things, and it has no meaning outside of such

relation,[9] any more than such adjectives as comfortable applied to a lodging, correct

applied to speech, persuasive applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from the

specific things to which they are applied. It would be a great gain for logic and

epistemology, if we were always to translate the noun " truth " back into the adjective "

true," and this back into the adverb " truly "; at least, if we were to do so until we have

familiarized ourselves thoroughly

(96) with the fact that " truth " is an abstract noun, summarizing a quality presented by

specific affairs in their own specific contents.

III

I have attempted, in the foregoing pages, a description of the function of knowledge in

its own terms and on its merits-a description which in intention is realistic, if by realistic

we are content to mean naturalistic, a description undertaken on the basis of what Mr.

Santayana has well called 11 following the lead of the subject-matter." Unfortunately at

the present time all such undertakings contend with a serious extraneous obstacle.

Accomplishing the undertaking has difficulties enough of its own to reckon with; and

first attempts are sure to be imperfect, if not radically wrong. But at present the attempts

are not, for the most part, even listened to on their own account, they are not examined

and criticised as naturalistic attempts. They are compared with undertakings of a wholly

different nature, with an epistemological theory o f knowledge, and the assumptions of

this extraneous theory arc taken as a ready-made standard by which to test their

validity. Literally of course, " epistemology " means only theory of knowledge; the term

might therefore have been employed simply as a synonym for a descriptive

(97) logic; for a theory that takes knowledge as it finds it and attempts to give the same

kind of an account of it that would be given of any other natural function or occurrence.

But the mere mention of what might have been only accentuates what is. The things that

pass for epistemology all assume that knowledge is not a natural function or event, but a

mystery.

Epistemology starts from the assumption that pertain conditions lie, back of knowledge.

The mystery would be great enough if knowledge were constituted by non-natural

conditions back of knowledge, but the mystery is increased by the fact that the

conditions are defined so as to be incompatible with knowledge. Hence the primary

problem of epistemology is: How is knowledge dberhaupt, knowledge at large,

possible? Because of the incompatibility between the concrete occurrence and function

of knowledge and the conditions back of it to which it must conform, a second problem

arises: How is knowledge in general, knowledge uberhaupt, valid? Hence the complete

divorce in contemporary thought between epistemology as theory of knowledge and

logic as an account of the specific ways in which particular beliefs that are better than

other alternative beliefs regarding the same matters are formed; and also the complete

divorce between a naturalistic, a biological and social psychology, setting forth how

( 98) the function of knowledge is evolved out of other natural activities, and

epistemology as an account of how knowledge is possible anyhow.

It is out of the question to set forth in this place in detail the contrast between

transcendental epistemology and an experimental theory of knowledge. It may assist the

understanding of the latter, however, if I point out, baldly and briefly, how, out o f the

distinctively empirical situation, there arise those assumptions which make knowledge a

mystery, and hence a topic for a peculiar branch of philosophizing.

As just pointed out, epistemology makes the possibility of knowledge a problem,

because it assumes back of knowledge conditions incompatible with the obvious traits

of knowledge as it empirically exists. These assumptions are that the organ or

instrument of knowledge is not a natural object, but some ready-made state of mind or

consciousness, something purely " subjective," a peculiar kind of existence which lives,

moves, and has its being in a realm different from things to be known; and that the

ultimate goal and content of knowledge is a flied, ready-made thing which has no

organic connections with the origin, purpose, and growth of the attempt to know it,

some kind of Ding-an-rich or absolute, extra-empirical Reality."

(1) It is not difficult to see at what point in

(99) the development of natural knowledge, or the signifying of one thing by another,

there arises the notion of the knowing medium as something radically different in the

order of existence from the thing to be known. It arises subsequent to the repeated

experience of non-fulfilment, of frustration and disappointment. The odor did not after

all mean the rose; it meant something quite different; and yet its indicative function was

exercised so forcibly that we could not help-or at least did not help-believing in the

existence of the rose. This is a familiar and typical kind of experience, one which very

early leads to the recognition that " things are not what they seem." There are two

contrasted methods of dealing with this recognition: one is the method indicated above

(p. 93). We go more thoroughly, patiently, and carefully into the facts of the case. We

employ all sorts of methods, invented for the purpose, of examining the things that are

signs and the things that are signified, and we experimentally produce various

situations, in order that we may tell what smells mean roses when roses are meant, what

it is about the smell and the rose that led us into error; and that we may be able to

discriminate those cases in which a suspended conclusion is all that circumstances

admit. We simply do the best we can to regulate our system of signs so that they

become as instructive as possible, utilizing for this purpose

(100) (as indicated above) all possible experiences of success and of failure, and

deliberately instituting cases which will throw light on the specific empirical causes of

success and failure.

Now it so happens that when the facts of error were consciously generalized and

formulated, namely in Greek thought, such a technique of specific inquiry and

rectification did not exist-in fact, it hardly could come into existence until after error

had been seized upon as constituting a fundamental anomaly. Hence the method just

outlined of dealing with the situation was impossible. We can imagine disconsolate

ghosts willing to postpone any professed solution of the difficulty till subsequent

generations have thrown more light on the question itself ; we can hardly imagine

passionate human beings exercising such reserve. At all events, Greek thought provided

what seemed a satisfactory way out: there are two orders of existence, one permanent

and complete, the noumenal region, to which alone the characteristic of Being is

properly applicable, the other transitory, phenomenal, sensible, a region of non-Being,

or at least of mere Coming-to-be, a region in which Being is hopelessly mixed with

non-Being, with the unreal. The former alone is the domain of knowledge, of truth; the

latter is the territory of opinion, confusion, and error. In short, the contrast within

experience of the cases in which things suc-

(101) -cessfully and unsuccessfully maintained and executed the meanings of other

things was erected into a wholesale difference of status in the intrinsic characters of the

things involved in the two types of cases.

With the beginnings of modern thought, the region of the " unreal," the source of

opinion and error, was located exclusively in the individual. The object was all real and

all satisfactory, but the " subject " could approach the object only through his own

subjective states, his " sensations " and " ideas." The Greek conception of two orders of

existence was retained, but instead of the two orders characterizing the " universe "

itself, one was the universe, the other was the individual mind trying to know that

universe. This scheme would obviously easily account for error and hallucination; but

how could knowledge, truth, ever come about such a basis? The Greek problem of the

possibility of error became the modern problem of the possibility of knowledge.

Putting the matter in terms that are independent of history, experiences of failure,

disappointment, non-fulfilment of the function of meaning and contention may lead the

individual to the path of science-to more careful and extensive investigation of the

things themselves, with a view to detecting specific sources of error, and guard-

(102) -ing against them, and regulating, so far as possible, the conditions under which

objects are bearers of meanings beyond themselves. But impatient of such slow and

tentative methods (which insure not infallibility but increased probability of valid

conclusions), by reason of disappointment a person may turn epistemologist. He may

then take the discrepancy, the failure of the smell to execute its own intended meaning,

as a wholesale, rather than as a specific fact: as evidence of a contrast in general

between things meaning and things meant, instead of as evidence of the need of a more

cautious and thorough inspection of odors and execution of operations indicated by

them. One may then say: Woe is me; smells are only my smells, subjective states

existing in an order of being made out of consciousness, while roses exist in another

order made out of a radically different sort of stuff; or, odors are made out of " finite "

consciousness as their stuff, while the real things, the objects which fulfil them, are

made out of an " infinite " consciousness as their material. Hence some purely

metaphysical tie has to be called in to bring them into connection with each other. And

yet this tie does not concern knowledge; it does not make the meaning of one odor any

more correct than that of another, nor enable us to discriminate relative degrees of

correctness. As a principle of control, this transcendental connec-

(103) -tion is related to all alike, and hence condemns and justifies all alike.[10]

It is interesting to note that the transcendentalist almost invariably first falls into the

psychological fallacy; and then having himself taken the psychologist's attitude (the

attitude which is interested in meanings as themselves self-inclosed " ideas ") accuses

the empiricist whom he criticises of having confused mere psychological existence with

logical validity. That is, he begins by supposing that the smell of our illustration (and all

the cognitional objects for which this is used as a

( 104) symbol) is a purely mental or psychical state, so that the question of logical

reference or intention is the problem of how the merely mental can "know " the extra-

mental. But from a strictly empirical point of view, the smell which knows is no more

merely mental than is the rose known. We may, if we please, say that the smell when

involving conscious moaning or intention is " mental," but this term " mental " does not

denote some separate type of existence -existence as a state of consciousness. It denotes

only the fact that the smell, a real and non-psychical object, now exercises an

intellectual function. This new property involves, as James has pointed out, an additive

relation-a new property possessed by a nonmental object, when that object, occurring in

a new context, assumes a further office and use.[11] To be " in the mind" means to be in

a situation in which the function of intending is directly concerned.[12] Will not some

one who believes that the knowing experience is ab origine a strictly " mental " thing,

explain how, as matter of fact, it does get a specific, extra-mental reference, capable of

being tested, confirmed, or re-

(105) -futed? Or, if he believes that viewing it as merely mental expresses only the form

it takes for psychological analysis, will he not explain why he so persistently attributes

the inherently " mental " characterization of it to the empiricist whom he criticises? An

object becomes meaning when used empirically in a certain way; and, under certain

circumstances, the exact character and worth of this meaning becomes an object of

solicitude. But the transcendental epistemologist with his purely psychical 11 meanings

" and his purely extra-empirical " truths " assumes a Deus ex Machina whose

mechanism is preserved a secret. And as if to add to the arbitrary character of his

assumption, he has to admit that the transcendental a. Priori faculty by which mental

states get objective reference does not in the least help us to discriminate, in the

concrete, between an objective reference that is false and one that is valid.

(2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure aboriginal " mental states " is, of course,

that of an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete in itself, of which our " mental states "

are bare transitory hints, their true meaning and their transcendent goal being the Truth

in rerum natura. If the organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed order of

existence different in kind from the Object to be known, then that Object must stand out

there in complete aloofness from the concrete purpose

( 106) and procedure of knowing it. But if we go back to the knowing as a natural

occurrence, capable of description, we find that just as a smell does not mean Rose in

general (or anything else at large), but means a specific group of qualities whose

experience is intended and anticipated, so the function of knowing is always expressed

in connections between a given experience and a specific possible wanted experience.

The " rose " that is meant in a particular situation is the rose of that situation. When this

experience is consummated, it is achieved as the fulfilment of the conditions in which

just that intention was entertained-not as the fulfilment of a faculty of knowledge or a

meaning in general. Subsequent meanings and subsequent fulfilments may increase,

may enrich the consummating experience; the object or content of the rose as known

may be other and fuller next time and so on. But we have no right to set up " a rose " at

large or in general as the object of the knowing odor; the object of a knowledge is

always strictly correlative to that particular thing which means it. It is not something

which can be put in a wholesale way over against that which cognitively refers to it, as

when the epistemologist puts the " real " rose (object) over against a merely phenomenal

or empirical rose which this smell happens to mean. As the meaning gets more

complex, fuller, more finely discriminated, the object which realizes or fulfils

(107) the meaning grows similarly in quality. But we cannot set up a rose, an object of

fullest, complete, and exhaustive content as that which is really meant by any and every

odor of a rose, whether it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test of the

cognitional rectitude of the odor lies in the specific object which it sets out to secure.

This is the meaning of the statement that the import of each term is found in its

relationship to the other. It applies to object meant as well as to the meaning.

Fulfilment, completion are always relative terms. Hence the criterion of the truth or

falsity of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional thing lies within the

relationships of the situation and not without. The thing that means another by means of

an intervening operation either succeeds or fails in accomplishing the operation

indicated, while this operation either gives or fails to give the object meant. Hence the

truth or falsity of the original cognitional object.

IV

From this excursion, I return in conclusion to a brief general characterization of those

situations in which we are aware that things mean other things and are so critically

aware of it that, in order to increase the probability of fulfilment and to decrease the

chance of frustration, all possible

(108) pains are taken to regulate the meanings that attach to things. These situations

define that type of knowing which we call scientific. There are things that claim to mean

other experiences; in which the trait of meaning other objects is not discovered ab extra,

and after the event, but is part of the thing itself. This trait of the thing is as realistic, as

specific, as any other of its traits. It is, therefore,, as open to inspection and

determination as to its nature, as is any other trait. Moreover, since it is upon this trait

that assurance (as distinct from accident) of fulfilment depends, an especial interest, an

absorbing interest, attaches to its determination. Hence the scientific type of knowledge

and its growing domination over other sorts.

We employ meanings in all intentional constructions of experience in all anticipations,

whether artistic, utilitarian or technological, social or moral. The success of the

anticipation is found to depend upon the character of the meaning. Hence the stress

upon a right determination of these meanings. Since they are the instruments upon

which fulfilment depends so far as that is controlled or other than accidental, they

become themselves objects of surpassing interest. For all persons at some times, and for

one class of persons (scientists) at almost all times, the determination of the meanings

employed in the control of fulfilments (of acting upon meanings) is central.

( 109) The experimental or pragmatic theory of knowledge explains the dominating

importance of science; it does not depreciate it or explain it away.

Possibly pragmatic writers are to blame for the tendency of their critics to assume that

the practice they have in mind is utilitarian in some narrow sense, referring to some

preconceived and inferior use though I cannot recall any evidence for this admission.

But what the pragmatic theory has in mind is precisely the fact that all the affairs of life

which need regulation-all values o f all types -depend upon utilizations of meanings.

Action is not to be limited to anything less than the carrying out of ideas, than the

execution, whether strenuous or easeful, of meanings. Hence the surpassing importance

which comes to attach to the careful, impartial construction of the meanings, and to their

constant survey and resurvey with reference to their value as evidenced by experiences

of fulfilment and deviation.

That truth denotes truths, that is, specific verifications, combinations of meanings and

outcomes reflectively viewed, is, one may say, the central point of the experimental

theory. Truth, in general or in the abstract, is a just name for an experienced relation

among the things of experience that sort of relation in which intents are retrospectively

viewed from the standpoint of the fullfilment which they secure through their own

natural

( 110) operation or incitement. Thus the experimental theory explains directly and

simply the absolutistic tendency to translate concrete true things into the general

relationship, Truth, and then to hypostatize this abstraction into identity with real being,

Truth per se and in se, of which all transitory things and events-that is, all experienced

realities -are only shadowy futile approximations. This type of relationship is central for

man's will, for man's conscious endeavor. To select, to conserve, to extend, to propagate

those meanings which the course of events has generated, to note their peculiarities, to

be in advance on the alert for them, to search for them anxiously, to substitute them for

meanings that eat up our energy in vain, defines the aim of rational effort and the goal

of legitimate ambition. The absolutistic theory is the transfer of this moral or voluntary

law of selective action into a quasi-physical (that is, metaphysical) law of indiscriminate

being. Identify metaphysical being with significant excellent being-that is, with those

relationships of things which, in our moments of deepest insight and largest survey, we

would continue and reproduce-and the experimentalist, rather than the absolutist, is he

who has a right to proclaim the supremacy of Truth, and the superiority of the life

devoted to Truth for its own sake over that of " mere " activity. But to read back into an

order of things which exists without

(111) the participation of our reflection and aim, the quality which defines the purpose

of our thought and endeavor is at one and the same stroke to mythologize reality and to

deprive the life of thoughtful endeavor of its ground for being.

Notes

1. Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrangement and in the matter of the

latter portion, from Mind, Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906.

2. I must remind the reader again of a point already suggested. It is the

identification of presence in consciousness with knowledge as such that leads to

setting up a mind (ego, subject) which has the peculiar property of knowing

(only so often it knows wrong!), or else that leads to supplying "sensations" with

the peculiar property of surveying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling

that knowledge involves relationship, there being, by supposition, no other thing

to which the thing in consciousness is related, it is forthwith related to a soul

substance, or to its ghostly offspring, a "subject," or to "consciousness" itself.

3. Let us further recall that this theory requires either that things present shall

already be psychical things (feelings, sensations, etc.), in order to be assimilated

to the knowing mind, subject to consciousness; or else translates genuinely

na�ve realism into the miracle of a mind that gets outside itself to lay its ghostly

hands upon the things of an external world.

4. This means that things may be present as known, just as they be present as hard

or soft, agreeable or disgusting, hoped for or dreaded. The mediacy, or the art of

intervention, which characterizes knowledge, indicates precisely the way in

which known things as known are immediately present.

5. If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the flux of perceptions and in habit-

principles of continuity and of organization-which he had in distinct and isolated

existences, he might have saved us both from German Erkenntnisstheorie, and

from that modern miracle play, the psychology of elements of consciousness,

that under the aegis of science, does not hesitate to have psychical elements

compound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to shame the

performances of their less acrobatic cousins, physical atoms.

6. "In other words, the situation as described is not to be confused with the case of

hunting on purpose to test an idea regarding the dog.

7. Dr. Moore, in an essay in " Contributions to Logical Theory" has brought out

clearly, on the basis of a criticism of the theory of meaning and fulfilment

advanced in Royce's " World and Individual," the full consequences of this

distinction. I quote one sentence (p. 350) : " Surely there is a pretty discernible

difference between experience as a purposive idea, and the experience which

fulfils this purpose. To call them both `ideas' is at least confusing." The text

above simply adds that there is also a discernible and important difference

between experiences which, de facto, are purposing and fulfilling (that is, are

seen to be such ab extra), and those which meant to be such, and are found to be

what they meant.

8. The association of science and philosophy with leisure, with a certain economic

surplus, is not accidental. It is practically worth while to postpone practice; to

substitute theorizing, to develop a new and fascinating mode of practice. But it is

the excess achievement of practice which makes this postponement and

substitution possible.

9. It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of meaning with a specific promise,

undertaking, or intention expressed by a thing which underlies, so far as I can

see, the criticisms passed upon the experimental or pragmatic view of the truth.

It is the same failure which is responsible for the wholly at large view of truth

which characterizes the absolutists.

10. The belief in the metaphysical transcendence of the object of knowledge seems

to have its real origin in an empirical transcendence of a very specific and

describable sort. The thing meaning is one thing; the thing meant is another

thing, and is (as already pointed out) a thing presented as not given in the same

way as is the thing which means. It is something to be so given. No amount of

careful and thorough inspection of the indicating and signifying things can

remove or annihilate this gap. The probability of correct meaning may be

increased in varying degrees and this is what we mean by control. But final

certitude can never be reached except experimentally-except by performing the

operations indicated and discovering whether or no the intended meaning is

fulfilled in propria persona. In this experimental sense, truth or the object of any

given meaning is always beyond or outside of the cognitional thing that means

it. Error as well as truth is s. necessary function of knowing. But the non-

empirical account of this transcendent (or beyond) relationship puts all the error

in one place (our knowledge), and all the truth in another (absolute

consciousness or else a thing-in-itself).

11. Compare his essay, " Does Consciousness Exist?" in the Journal of Philosophy,

Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. L, p. 480.

12. Compare the essay on the "Problem of Consciousness," by Professor

Woodbridge, in the Garman Memorial Volume, entitled 11 Studies in

Philosophy and Psychology"

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http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910b/Dewey_1910_07.html

[Bajado el 23 de agosto de 2011]

Originally published as:

John Dewey. "Beliefs and Existences", Chapter 8 in The Influence of Darwin on

Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1910) : 169 - 197.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays

Chapter 7: Beliefs and Existences[1]

Table of Contents | Next | Previous

I

BELIEFS look both ways, towards persons and toward things. They are the original Mr.

Facing-both-ways. They form or judge-justify or condemn-the agents who entertain

them and who insist upon them. They are of things whose immediate meanings form

their content. To believe is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign import. The

collection and interaction of these appraisals and assessments is the world of the

common man,-that is, of man as an individual and not as a professional being or class

specimen. Thus things are characters, not mere entities; they

(170) behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior that exemplifies and tests their

character, they help and hinder; disturb and pacify; resist and comply; are dismal and

mirthful, orderly and deformed, queer and commonplace; they agree and disagree; are

better and worse.

Thus the human world, whether or no it have core and axis, has presence and

transfiguration. It means here and now, not in some transcendent sphere. It moves, of

itself, to varied incremental meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine or

diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct, for conduct is the working out of the

commitments of belief. That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed, acted upon.

The moments of its crucial fulfilment are the natural " transcendentals "; the decisive,

the critical, standards of further estimation, selection, and rejection. That believed worse

is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for the better. Characters, in being

condensations of belief, are thus at once the reminders and the prognostications of weal

and woe; they concrete and they regulate the terms of effective apprehension and

appropriation of things. This general regulative function is what we mean in calling

them characters, forms.

For beliefs, made in the course of existence, reciprocate by making existence still

farther, by developing it. Beliefs are not made by existence

( 171) in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense. " Reality " naturally instigates

belief. It appraises itself and through this self-appraisal manages its affairs. As things

are surcharged valuations, so " consciousness " means ways of believing and

disbelieving. It is interpretation; not merely existence aware of itself as fact, but

existence discerning, judging itself, approving and disapproving.

This double outlook and connection of belief, its implication, on one side, with beings

who suffer and endeavor, and, its complication on the other, with the meanings and

worths of things, is its glory or its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep connection on one

side and throw it away on the other. We cannot preserve significance and decline the

personal attitude in which it is inscribed and operative, any more than we can succeed in

making things " states " of a " consciousness " whose business is to be an interpretation

of things. Beliefs are personal affairs, and personal affairs are adventures, and

adventures are, if you please, shady. But equally discredited, then, is the universe of

meanings. For the world has meaning as somebody's, somebody's at a juncture, taken

for better or Worse, and you shall not have completed your metaphysics till you have

told whose world is meant and how and what for-in what bias and to what effect. Here

is a cake that is had only

( 172) by eating it, just as there is digestion only for life as well as by life.

So far the standpoint of the common man. But the professional man, the philosopher,

has been largely occupied in a systematic effort to discredit the standpoint of the

common man, that is, to disable belief as an ultimately valid principle. Philosophy is

shocked at the frank, almost brutal, evocation of beliefs by and in natural existence, like

witches out of a desert heath-at a mode of production which is neither logical, nor

physical, nor psychological, but just natural, empirical. For modern philosophy is, as

every college senior recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and

lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Passionless

imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection to a ready-made and

finished reality-physical it may be, mental it may be, logical it may be-is its professed

ideal. Forswearing the reality of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the

genuineness of the incomplete, the tentative, it has taken an oath of allegiance to

Reality, objective, universal, complete; made perhaps of atoms, perhaps of sensations,

perhaps of logical meanings. This ready-made reality, already including everything,

must of course swallow and absorb belief, must produce it psychologically,

mechanically, or logically, according to its own nature; must in any

( 173) case, instead of acquiring aid and support from belief, resolve it into one of its

own preordained creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony, unity, totality.[2]

Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than the propitious

outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ulterior implications in order to

recast them, to rectify their errors, cultivate their waste places, heal their diseases,

fortify their feeblenesses :-the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects having

no nature save to be known.

Not that their philosophers have admitted the concrete realizability of their scheme. On

the

( 174) contrary, the assertion of the absolute " Reality " of what is empirically

unrealizable is a part of the scheme; the ideal of a universe of pure, cognitional objects,

fixed elements in fixed relations. Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and

transcendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining this object in as many differing

ways as they have different conceptions of the ideal and method of knowledge, are at

one in their devotion to an identification of Reality with something that connects

monopolistically with passionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference,

origin, and outlook.[3]

What is to be said of this attempt to sever the cord which naturally binds together

personal attitudes and the meaning of things ? This much at least: the effort to extract

meanings, values, from the beliefs that ascribe them, and to give the former absolute

metaphysical validity while the latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wil-

( 175) -derness of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which, as long as " our interest's on

the dangerous edge of things," will attract an admiring, even if suspicious, audience.

Moreover, we may admit that the attempt to catch the universe of immediate

experience, of action and passion, coming and going, to damn it in its present body in

order expressly to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to validate the meaning of beliefs by

discrediting their natural existence, to attribute absolute worth to the intent of human

convictions just because of the absolute worthlessness of their content-that the

performance of this feat of virtuosity has developed philosophy to its present wondrous,

if formidable, technique.

But can we claim more than a succ�s d'estime? Consider again the nature of the effort.

The world of immediate meanings, of the world empirically sustained in beliefs, is to be

sorted out into two portions, metaphysically discontinuous, one of which shall alone be

good and true " Reality," the fit material of passionless, beliefless knowledge; while the

other part, that which is excluded, shall be referred exclusively to belief and treated as

mere appearance, purely subjective, impressions or effects in consciousness, or as that

ludicrously abject modern discovery-an epiphenomenon. And this division into the real

and the unreal is accomplished by the very individual whom his own

( 176) "absolute" results reduce to phenomenality, in terms of the very immediate

experience which is infected with worthlessness, and on the basis of preference, of

selection that are declared to be unreal! Can the thing be done?

Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may, always reassert itself. The very pushing

it out of " Reality " may but add to its potential energy, and invoke a more violent

recoil. When affections and aversions, with the beliefs in which they record themselves

and the efforts they exact, are reduced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle attendance

upon a reality complete without them, to which they vainly strive to accommodate

themselves by mirroring, then may the emotions flagrantly burst forth with the claim

that, as a friend of mine puts it, reason is only a fig leaf for their nakedness. When one

man says that need, uncertainty, choice, novelty, and strife have no place in Reality,

which is made up wholly of established things behaving by foregone rules, then may

another man be provoked to reply that all such fixities, whether named atoms or God,

whether they be fixtures of a sensational, a positivistic, or an idealistic system, have

existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles, and instrumentalities of

conscious agents and patients. For home rule may be found in the unwritten efficacious

constitution of experience.

( 177)

That contemporaneously we are in the presence of such a reaction is apparent. Let us, in

pursuit of our topic, inquire how it came about and why it takes the form that it takes.

This consideration may not only occupy the hour, but may help diagram some future

parallelogram of forces. The account calls for some sketching (1) of the historical

tendencies which have shaped the situation in which a Stoic theory of knowledge claims

metaphysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies that have furnished the despised

principle of belief opportunity and means of reassertion.

II

Imagination readily travels to a period when a gospel of intense, and, one may say,

deliberate passionate disturbance appeared to be conquering the Stoic ideal of

passionless reason; when the demand for individual assertion by faith against the

established, embodied objective order was seemingly subduing the idea of the total

subordination of the individual to the universal. By what course of events came about

the dramatic reversal, in which an ethically conquered Stoicism became the conqueror,

epistemologically, of Christianity?

How are our imaginations haunted by the idea of what might have happened if

Christianity had

( 178) found ready to its hand intellectual formulations corresponding to its practical

proclamations!

That the ultimate principle of conduct is affectional and volitional; that God is love; that

access to the principle is by faith, a personal attitude; that belief, surpassing logical

basis and warrant, works out through its own operation its own fulfilling evidence: such

was the implied moral metaphysic of Christianity. But this implication needed to

become a theory, a theology, a formulation; and in this need, it found no recourse save

to philosophies that had identified true existence with the proper object of logical

reason. For, in Greek thought, after the valuable meanings, the meanings of industry and

art that appealed to sustained and serious choice, had given birth and status to reflective

reason, reason denied its ancestry of organized endeavor, and proclaimed itself in its

function of self-conscious logical thought to be the author and warrant of all genuine

things. Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared for it the needed means of its

own intellectual statement! We recall Aristotle's account of moral knowing, and his

definition of man. Man as man, he tells us, is a principle that may be termed either

desiring thought or thinking desire. Not as pure intelligence does man know, but as an

organization of desires effected through reflection

( 179) upon their own conditions and consequences. What if Aristotle had only

assimilated his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge! Because

practical thinking was so human, Aristotle rejected it in favor of pure, passionless

cognition, something superhuman. Thinking desire is experimental, is tentative, not

absolute. It looks to the future and to the past for help in the future. It is contingent, not

necessary. It doubly relates to the individual: to the individual thing as experienced by

an individual agent; not to the universal. Hence desire is a sure sign of defect, of

privation, of non-being, and seeks surcease in something which knows it not. Hence

desiring reason culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect existence, stands forever in

contrast with passionless reason functioning in pure knowledge, logically complete, of

perfect being.

I need not remind you how through Neo-Platonism, St. Augustine, and the Scholastic

renaissance, these conceptions became imbedded in Christian philosophy; and what a

reversal occurred of the original practical principle of Christianity. Belief is henceforth

important because it is the mere antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal and

phenomenal world infected with non-being, of true knowledge to be achieved only in a

world of completed Being. Desire is but the self-consciousness of defect striving to its

own termination

(180) in perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of perfect being. I need not

remind you that the prima facie subordination of reason to authority, of knowledge to

faith, in the medieval code, is, after all, but the logical result of the doctrine that man as

man (since only reasoning desire) is merely phenomenal; and has his reality in God,

who as God is the complete union of rational insight and being-the term of man's desire,

and the fulfilment of his feeble attempts at knowing. Authority, " faith " as it then had to

be conceived, meant just that this Being comes externally to the aid of man, otherwise

hopelessly doomed to misery in long drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines

him till, in the next world under more favoring auspices, he may have his desires stilled

in good, and his faith may yield to knowledge: for we forget that the doctrine of

immortality was not an appendage, but an integral part of the theory that since

knowledge is the true function of man, happiness is attained only in knowledge, which

itself exists only in achievement of perfect Being or God.

For my part, I can but think that medieval absolutism, with its provision for

authoritative supernatural assistance in this world and assertion of supernatural

realization in the next, was more logical, as well as more humane, than the modern

absolutism, that, with the same logical premises, bids man find adequate consolation

and support in

(181) the fact that, after all, his strivings are already eternally fulfilled, his errors already

eternally transcended, his partial beliefs already eternally comprehended.

The modern age is marked by a refusal to be satisfied with the postponement of the

exercise and function of reason to another and supernatural sphere, and by a resolve to

practise itself upon its present object, nature, with all the joys thereunto appertaining.

The pure intelligence of Aristotle, thought thinking itself, expresses itself as free inquiry

directed upon the present conditions of its own most effective exercise. The principle of

the inherent relation of thought to being was preserved intact, but its practical locus was

moved down from the next world to this. Spinoza's " God or Nature " is the logical

outcome; as is also his strict correlation of the attribute of matter with the attribute of

thought; while his combination of thorough distrust of passion and faith with complete

faith in reason and all-absorbing passion for knowledge is so classic an embodiment of

the whole modern contradiction that it may awaken admiration where less thorough-

paced formulations call out irritation.

In the practical devotion of present intelligence to its present object, nature, science was

born, and also its philosophical counterpart, the theory of knowledge. Epistemology

only generalized in

(182) its loose, although narrow and technical way, the question practically urgent in

Europe: How is science possible? How can intelligence actively and directly get at its

object?

Meantime, through Protestantism the values, the meanings formerly characterizing the

next life' (the opportunity for full perception of perfect being), were carried over into

present-day emotions and responses.

The dualism between faith authoritatively supported as the principle of this life, and

knowledge supernaturally realized as the principle of the next, was transmuted into the

dualism between intelligence now and here occupied with natural things, and the

affections and accompanying beliefs, now and here realizing spiritual worths. For a time

this dualism operated as a convenient division of labor. Intelligence, freed from

responsibility for and preoccupation with supernatural truths, could occupy itself the

more fully and efficiently with the world that now is; while the affections, charged with

the values evoked in the medieval discipline, entered into the present enjoyment of the

delectations previously reserved for the saints. Directness took the place of systematic

intermediation; the present of the future; the individual's emotional consciousness of the

supernatural institution. Between science and faith, thus conceived, a bargain was

struck. Hands off ;each to his own,

(183) was the compact; the natural world to intelligence, the moral, the spiritual world

to belief. This (natural) world for knowledge; that (supernatural) world for belief. Thus

the antithesis, unexpressed, ignored, within experience, between belief and knowledge,

between the purely objective values of thought and the personal values of passion and

volition, was more fundamental, more determining, than the opposition, explicit and

harassing, within knowledge, between subject and object, mind and matter.

This latent antagonism worked out into the open. In scientific detail, knowledge

encroached upon the historic traditions and opinions with which the moral and religious

life had identified itself. It made history to be as natural, as much its spoil, as physical

nature. It turned itself upon man, and proceeded remorselessly to account for his

emotions, his volitions, his opinions. Knowledge, in its general theory, as philosophy,

went the same way. It was pre-committed to the old notion: the absolutely real is the

object of knowledge, and hence is something universal and impersonal. So, whether by

the road of sensationalism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism or objective

idealism, it came about that concrete selves, specific feeling and willing beings, were

relegated with the beliefs in which they declare themselves to the "phenomenal."

(184)

III

So much for the situation against which some contemporary tendencies are a deliberate

protest.

What of the positive conditions that give us not mere protest, like the unreasoning revolt

of heart against head found at all epochs, but something articulate and constructive? The

field is only too large, and I shall limit myself to the evolution of the knowledge

standpoint itself. I shall suggest, first, that the progress of intelligence directed upon

natural materials has evolved a procedure of knowledge that renders untenable the

inherited conception of knowledge; and, secondly, that this result is reinforced by the

specific results of some of the special sciences.

1. First, then, the very use of the knowledge standpoint, the very expression of the

knowledge preoccupation, has produced methods and tests that, when formulated,

intimate a radically different conception of knowledge, and of its relation to existence

and belief, than the orthodox one.

The one thing that stands out is that thinking is inquiry, and that knowledge as science is

the outcome of systematically directed inquiry. For a time it was natural enough that

inquiry should be interpreted in the old sense, as just change of subjective attitudes and

opinions to make them square up with a " reality " that is already there

( 185) in ready-made, fixed, and finished form. The rationalist had one notion of the

reality, i.e., that it was of the nature of laws, genera, or an ordered system, and so

thought of concepts, axioms, etc., as the indicated modes of representation. The

empiricist, holding reality to be a lot of little discrete particular lumps, thought of

disjointed sensations as its appropriate counterpart. But both alike were thorough

conformists. If " reality " is already and completely given, and if knowledge is just

submissive acceptance, then, of course, inquiry is only a subjective change in the human

" mind " or in " consciousness,"-these being subjective and "unreal."

But the very development of the sciences served to reveal a peculiar and intolerable

paradox. Epistemology, having condemned inquiry once for all to the region of

subjectivity in an invidious sense, finds itself in flat opposition in principle and in detail

to the assumption and to the results of the sciences. Epistemology is bound to deny to

the results of the special sciences in detail any ulterior objectivity just because they

always are in a process of inquiry-in solution. While a man may not be halted at being

told that his mental activities, since his, are not genuinely real, many men will draw

violently back at being told that all the discoveries, conclusions, explanations, and

theories of the sciences share the same fate, being the products

( 186) of a discredited mind. And, in general, epistemology, in relegating human

thinking as inquiry to a merely phenomenal region, makes concrete approximation and

conformity to objectivity hopeless. Even if it did square itself up to and by " reality " it

never could be sure of it. The ancient myth of Tantalus and his effort to drink the water

before him seems to be ingeniously prophetic of modern epistemology. The thirstier, the

needier of truth the human mind, and the intenser the efforts put forth to slake itself in

the ocean of being just beyond the edge of consciousness, the more surely the living

waters of truth recede!

When such self-confessed sterility is joined with consistent derogation of all the special

results of the special sciences, some one is sure to raise the cry of " dog in the manger,"

or of " sour grapes." A revision of the theory of thinking, of inquiry, would seem to be

inevitable; a revision which should cease trying to construe knowledge as an attempted

approximation to a reproduction of reality under conditions that condemn it in advance

to failure; a revision which should start frankly from the fact of thinking as inquiring,

and purely external realities as terms in inquiries, and which should construe validity,

objectivity, truth, and the test and system of truths, on the basis of what they actually

mean and do within inquiry.

Such a standpoint promises ample revenge for

(187) the long damnation and longer neglect to which the principle of belief has been

subjected. The whole procedure of thinking as developed in those extensive and

intensive inquiries that constitute the sciences, is but rendering into a systematic

technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully pursued, the rougher and cruder

means by which practical human beings have in all ages worked out the implications of

their beliefs, tested them, and endeavored in the interests of economy, efficiency, and

freedom, to render them coherent with one another. Belief, sheer, direct, unmitigated

belief, reappears as the working hypothesis; action that at once develops and tests belief

reappears in experimentation, deduction, demonstration; while the machinery of

universals, axioms, a priori truths, etc., becomes a systematization of the way in which

men have always worked out, in anticipation of overt action, the implications of their

beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the interests of obviating unfavorable, and

securing welcome consequences. Observation, with its machinery of sensations,

measurements, etc., is the resurrection of the way in which agents have always faced

and tried to define the problems that face them; truth is the union of abstract postulated

meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way that circumvents the latter by judging

them from a new standpoint, while it tests concepts by using

(188) them as methods in the same active experience. It all comes to experience

personally conducted and personally consummated.

Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little more brightly over the horizon of

epistemological prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing prevents admitting the

genuineness both of thinking activities and of their characteristic results, except the

notion that belief itself is not a genuine ingredient of existence-a notion which itself is

not only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convictions of the common man and the

hypotheses of science, finds its proud proof in the fact that it does not demean itself so

unworthily as to work.

Once believe that beliefs themselves are as " real " as anything else can ever be, and we

have a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness, really inhere ; and in which personal

attitudes and responses are real both in their own distinctive existence, and as the only

ways in which an as yet undetermined factor of reality takes on shape, meaning, value,

truth. If " to wilful men the injuries that they themselves procure, must be their

schoolmasters "-and all beliefs are wilful--then by the same token the propitious

evolutions of meaning, which wilful men secure to an expectant universe, must be their

compensation and their justification. In a doubtful and needy universe elements must be

beggarly, and the development

( 189) of personal beliefs into experimentally executed systems of actions, is the

organized bureau of philanthropy which confers upon a travailing universe the meaning

for which it cries out. The apostrophe of the poet is above all to man the thinker, the

inquirer, the knower

O Dreamer ! O Desirer, goer down

Unto untraveled seas in untried ships,

O crusher of the unimagined grape,

On unconceiv�d lips.

2. Biology, psychology, and the social sciences proffer an imposing body of concrete

facts that also point to the rehabilitation of belief-to the interpretation of knowledge as a

human and practical outgrowth of belief, not to belief as the state to which knowledge is

condemned in a merely finite and phenomenal world. I need not, as I cannot, here

summarize the psychological revision which the notions of sensation, perception,

conception, cognition in general have undergone, all to one intent. "Motor" is writ large

on their face. The testimony of biology is unambiguous to the effect that the organic

instruments of the whole intellectual life, the sense-organs and brain and their

connections, have been developed on a definitely practical basis and for practical aims,

for the purpose of such control over conditions as will sustain and vary the meanings of

life. The his-

(190) -toric sciences are equally explicit in their evidence that knowledge as a system of

information and instruction is a cooperative social achievement, at all times socially

toned, sustained, and directed; and that logical thinking is a reweaving through

individual activity of this social fabric at such points as are indicated by prevailing

needs and aims.

This bulky and coherent body of testimony is not, of course, of itself philosophy. But it

supplies, at all events, facts that have scientific backing, and that are as worthy of regard

as the facts pertinent to any science. At the present time these facts seem to have some

peculiar claim just because they present traits largely ignored in prior philosophic

formulations, while those belonging to mathematics and physics have so largely

wrought their sweet will on systems. Again, it would seem as if in philosophies built

deliberately upon the knowledge principle, any body of known facts should not have to

clamor for sympathetic attention.

Such being the case, the reasons for ruling psychology and sociology and allied sciences

out of competency to give philosophic testimony have more significance than the bare

denial of jurisdiction. They are evidences of the deep-rooted preconception that

whatever concerns a particular conscious agent, a wanting, struggling, satisfied

( 191) and dissatisfied being, must of course be only " phenomenal " in import.

This aversion is the more suggestive when the professed idealist appears as the special

champion of the virginity of pure knowledge. The idealist, so content with the notion

that consciousness determines reality, provided it be done once for all, at a jump and in

lump, is so uneasy in presence of the idea that empirical conscious beings genuinely

determine existences now and here! One is reminded of the story told, I think, by

Spencer. Some committee had organized and contended, through a long series of

parliaments, for the passage of a measure. At last one of their meetings was interrupted

with news of success. Consternation was the result. What was to become of the

occupation of the committee? So, one asks, what is to become of idealism at large, of

the wholesale unspecifiable determination of " reality " by or in " consciousness," if

specific conscious beings, John Smiths, and Susan Smiths (to say nothing of their

animal relations), beings with bowels and brains, are found to exercise influence upon

the character and existence of reals ?

One would be almost justified in construing idealism as a Pickwickian scheme, so

willing is it to idealize the principle of intelligence at the expense of its specific

undertakings, were it not that this reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic

( 192) basis and tenor of idealism-its preoccupation with logical contents and relations

in abstraction from their situs and function in conscious living beings.

IV

I have suggested to you the na�ve conception of the relation of beliefs to realities: that

beliefs are themselves real without discount, manifesting their reality in the usual proper

way, namely, by modifying and shaping the reality of other things, so that they connect

the bias, the preferences and affections, the needs and endeavors of personal lives with

the values, the characters ascribed to things -the latter thus becoming worthy of human

acquaintance and responsive to human intercourse. This was followed by a sketch of the

history of thought, indicating how beliefs and all they insinuate were subjected to

preconceived notions of knowledge and of " reality " as a monopolistic possession of

pure intellect. Then I traced some of the motifs that make for reconsideration of the

supposed uniquely exclusive relation of logical knowledge and "reality "; motifs that

make for a less invidiously superior attitude towards the convictions of the common

man.

In concluding, I want to say a word or two to mitigate for escape is impossible-some

misun-

(193) -derstandings. And, to begin with, while possible doubts inevitably troop with

actual beliefs, the doctrine in question is not particularly sceptical. The radical

empiricist, the humanist, the pragmatist, label him as you will, believes not in fewer but

in more " realities " than the orthodox philosophers warrant. He is not concerned, for

example, in discrediting objective realities and logical or universal thinking; he is

interested in such a reinterpretation of the sort of " reality " which these things possess

as will accredit, without depreciation, concrete empirical conscious centers of action

and passion.

My second remark is to the opposite effect. The intent is not especially credulous,

although it starts from and ends with the radical credulity of all knowledge. To suppose

that because the sciences are ultimately instrumental to human beliefs, we are therefore

to be careless of the most exact possible use of extensive and systematic scientific

methods, is like supposing that because a watch is made to tell present time, and not to

be an exemplar of transcendent, absolute time, watches might as well be made of cheap

stuffs, casually wrought and clumsily put together. It is the task of telling present time,

with all its urgent implications, that brings home, steadies, and enlarges the

responsibility for the best possible use of intelligence, the instrument.

( 194)

For one, I have no interest in the old, old scheme of derogating from the worth of

knowledge in order to give an uncontrolled field for some species beliefs to run riot in,-

be these beliefs even faith in immortality, in some special sort of a Deity, or in some

particular brand of freedom. Any one of our beliefs is subject to criticism, revision, and

even ultimate elimination through the development of its own implications by

intelligently directed action. Because reason is a scheme of working out the meanings of

convictions in terms of one another and of the consequences they import in further

experience, convictions are the more, not the less, amenable and responsible to the full

exercise of reason.[4]

Thus we are put on the road to that most de-

(195) -sirable thing; the union of acknowledgment of moral powers and demands with

thoroughgoing naturalism. No one really wants to lame man's practical nature; it is the

supposed exigencies of natural science that force the hand. No one really bears a grudge

against naturalism for the sake of obscurantism. It is the need of some sacred

reservation for moral interests that coerces. We all want to be as naturalistic as we can

be. But the " can be " is the rub. If we set out with a fixed dualism of belief and

knowledge, then the uneasy fear that the natural sciences are going to encroach and

destroy " spiritual values " haunts us. So we build them a citadel and fortify it; that is,

we isolate, professionalize, and thereby weaken beliefs. But if beliefs are the most

natural, and in that sense, the most metaphysical of all things, and if knowledge is an

organized technique for working out their implications and interrelations, for directing

their formation and employ, how unnecessary, how petty the fear and the caution.

Because freedom of belief is ours, free thought may exercise itself; the freer the thought

the more sure the emancipation of belief. Hug some special belief and one fears

knowledge; believe in belief and one loves and cleaves to knowledge.

We have here, too, the possibility of a common understanding, in thought, in language,

in outlook,

(196) of the philosopher and the common man. What would not the philosopher give,

did he not have to part with some of his common humanity in order to join a class?

Does he not always, when challenged, justify himself with the contention that all men

naturally philosophize, and that he but does in a conscious and orderly way what leads

to harm when done in an indiscriminate and irregular way? If philosophy be at once a

natural history and a logic-an art-of beliefs, then its technical justification is at one with

its human justification. The natural attitude of man, said Emerson, is believing; " the

philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing." Let the struggle

then enlighten and enlarge beliefs; let the reasons kindle and engender new beliefs.

Finally, it is not a solution, but a problem which is presented. As philosophers, our

disagreements as to conclusions are trivial compared with our disagreement as to

problems. To see the problem another sees, in the same perspective and at the same

angle-that amounts to something. Agreement in solutions is in comparison perfunctory.

To experience the same problem another feels that perhaps is agreement. In a world

where distinctions are as invidious as comparisons are odious, and where intellect works

only by comparison and distinction, pray what is one to do?

But beliefs are personal matters, and the person,

(197) we may still believe, is social. To be a man is to be thinking desire; and the

agreement of desires is not in oneness of intellectual conclusion, but in the sympathies

of passion and the concords of action -and yet significant union in affection and

behavior may depend upon a consensus in thought that is secured only by

discrimination and comparison.

Notes

1. Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American

Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905, and reprinted

with verbal revisions from the Philosophical Review, Vol. XV., March, 1906.

The substitution of the word " Existences " for the word "Realities" (in the

original title) is due to a subsequent recognition on my part that the eulogistic

historic associations with the word " Reality " (against which the paper was a

protest) infected the interpretation of the paper itself, so that the use of some

more colorless word was desirable.

2. Since writing the above I have read the following words of a candidly

unsympathetic friend of philosophy: " Neither philosophy nor science can

institute man's relation to the universe, because such reciprocity must have

existed before any kind of science or philosophy can begin; since each

investigates phenomena by means of the intellect, and independent of the

position and feeling of the investigator; whereas the relation of man to the

universe is defined, not by the intellect alone, but by his sensitive perception

aided by all his spiritual powers. However much one may assure and instruct a

man that all real existence is an idea, that matter is made up of atoms, that the

essence of life is corporality or will, that Beat, light, movement, electricity, are

different manifestations of one and the same energy, one cannot thereby explain

to a being with pains, pleasures, hopes, and fears his position in the universe."

Tolstoi, essay on " Religion and Morality," in " Essays, Letters, and

Miscellanies."

3. Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of interpreting Hegel as a

Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified, is a purely Anglo-American

habit. This is no place to enter into the intricacies of Hegelian exegesis, but the

subordination of both logical meaning and of mechanical existence to Geist, to

life in its own developing movement, would seem to stand out in any unbiased

view of Hegel. At all events, I wish to recognize my own personal debt to Hegel

for the view set forth in this paper, without, of course, implying that it represents

Hegel's own intention.

4. There will of course come in time with the development of this point of view an

organon of beliefs. The signs of a genuine as against a simulated belief will be

studied; belief as a vital personal reaction will be discriminated from habitual,

incorporate, unquestioned (because unconsciously exercised) traditions of social

classes and professions. In his "Will to Believe" Professor James has already

laid down two traits of genuine belief (viz., " forced option," and acceptance of

responsibility for results) which are almost always ignored in criticisms (really

caricatures) of his position. In the light of such an organon, one might come to

doubt whether belief in, say, immortality (as distinct from hope on one side and

a sort of intellectual balance of probability of opinion on the other) can

genuinely exist at all.

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http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910b/Dewey_1910_10.html

[Bajado el 23 de agosto de 2011]

Originally published as:

John Dewey. "'Consciousness' and Experience", Chapter 10 in The Influence of Darwin

on Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1910) : 242 -

270.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays

Chapter 10: "Consciousness" and Experience[1]

Table of Contents | Next | Previous

EVERY science in its final standpoint and working aims is controlled by conditions

lying outside itself-conditions that subsist in the practical life of the time. With no

science is this as obviously true as with psychology. Taken without nicety of analysis,

no one would deny that psychology is specially occupied with the individual; that it

wishes to find out those things that proceed peculiarly from the individual, and the

mode of their connection with him. Now, the way in which the individual is conceived,

the value that is attributed to him, the things in his make-up that arouse interest, are not

due at the outset to psychology. The scientific view regards these matters in a reflected,

a borrowed, medium. They are revealed in the light of social life. An autocratic, an

aristocratic, a democratic society propound such different estimates of the worth and

place of individuality; they procure for the individual as an individual such different

sorts of experience;

(243) they aim at arousing such different impulses and at organizing them according to

such different purposes, that the psychology arising in each must show a different

temper.

In this sense, psychology is a political science. While the professed psychologist, in his

conscious procedure, may easily cut his subject-matter loose from these practical ties

and references, yet the starting point and goal of his course are none the less socially set.

In this conviction I venture to introduce to an audience that could hardly be expected to

be interested in the technique of psychology, a technical subject, hoping that the human

meaning may yet appear.

There is at present a strong, apparently a growing tendency to conceive of psychology

as an account of the consciousness of the individual, considered as something in and by

itself ; consciousness, the assumption virtually runs, being of such an order that it may

be analyzed, described, and explained in terms of just itself. The statement, as

commonly made, is that psychology is an account of consciousness, qua consciousness;

and the phrase is supposed to limit psychology to a certain definite sphere of fact that

may receive adequate discussion for scientific purposes, without troubling itself with

what lies outside. Now if this conception be true, there is no intimate, no important

connection of psychology and philosophy at large.

( 244) That philosophy, whose range is comprehensive, whose problems are catholic,

should be held down by a discipline whose voice is as partial as its material is limited, is

out of the range of intelligent discussion.

But there is another possibility. If the individual of whom psychology treats be, after all,

a Social individual, any absolute setting off and apart of a sphere of consciousness as,

even for scientific purposes, self-sufficient, is condemned in advance. All such

limitation, and all inquiries, descriptions, explanations that go with it, are only

preliminary. "Consciousness" is but a symbol, an anatomy whose life is in natural and

social operations. To know the symbol, the psychical letter, is important; but its

necessity lies not within itself, but in the need of a language for reading the things

signified. If this view be correct, we cannot be so sure that psychology is without large

philosophic significance. Whatever meaning the individual has for the social life that he

both incorporates and animates, that meaning has psychology for philosophy.

This problem is too important and too large to suffer attack in an evening's address. Yet

I venture to consider a portion of it, hoping that such things as appear will be useful

clues in entering wider territory. We may ask what is the effect upon psychology of

considering its material as

(245) something so distinct as to be capable of treatment without involving larger

issues. In this inquiry we take as representative some such account of the science as

this: Psychology deals with consciousness " as such " in its various modes and

processes. It aims at an isolation of each such as will permit accurate description: at

statement of its place in the serial order such as will enable us to state the laws by which

one calls another into being, or as will give the natural history of its origin, maturing,

and dissolution. It is both analytic and synthetic-analytic in that it resolves each state

into its constituent elements; synthetic in that it discovers the processes by which these

elements combine into complex wholes and series. It leaves alone-it shuts out-questions

concerning the validity, the objective import of these modifications: of their value in

conveying truth, in effecting goodness, in constituting beauty. For it is just with such

questions of worth, of validity, that philosophy has to do.

Some such view as this is held by the great majority of working psychologists to-day. A

variety of reasons have conspired to bring about general acceptance. Such a view seems

to enroll one in the ranks of the scientific men rather than of the metaphysicians-and

there are those who distrust the metaphysicians. Others desire to take problems

piecemeal and in detail, avoiding that ex-

(246) cursion into ultimates, into that never-ending panorama of new questions and new

possibilities that seems to be the fate of the philosopher. While no temperate mind can

do other than sympathize with this view, it is hardly more than an expedient. For, as Mr.

James remarks, after disposing of the question of free-will by relegating it to the domain

of the metaphysician : "Metaphysics means only an unusually obstinate attempt to think

clearly and consistently "-and clearness and consistency are not things to be put off

beyond a certain point. When the metaphysician chimes in with this new found modesty

of the psychologist, so different from the disposition of Locke and Hume and the Mills,

salving his metaphysical conscience with the remark-it hardly possesses the dignity of a

conviction-that the partial sciences, just because they are partial, are not expected to be

coherent with themselves nor with one another; when the metaphysician, I say, praises

the psychologist for sticking to his last, we are reminded that another motive is also at

work. There is a half-conscious irony in this abnegation of psychology. It is not the first

time that science has assumed the work of Cinderella; and, since Mr. Huxley has

happily reminded her, she is not altogether oblivious, in her modesty, of a possible

future check to the pride of her haughty sister, and of a certain coronation that shall

mark her coming to her own.

(247)

But, be the reasons as they may, there is little doubt of the fact. Almost all our working

psychologists admit, nay, herald this limitation of their work. I am not presumptuous

enough to set myself against this array. I too proclaim myself of those who believe that

psychology has to do (at a certain point, that is) with " consciousness as such." But I do

not believe that the limitation is final. Quite the contrary: if " consciousness " or " state

of consciousness" be given intelligible meaning, I believe that this conception is the

open gateway into the fair fields of philosophy. For, note you, the phrase is an

ambiguous one. It may mean one thing to the metaphysician who proclaims: Here

finally we have psychology recognizing her due metes and bounds, giving bonds to

trespass no more. It may mean quite another thing to the psychologist in his work-

whatever he may happen to say about it. It may be that the psychologist deals with

states of consciousness as the significant, the analyzable and describable form, to which

he reduces the things he is studying. Not that they are that existence, but that they are its

indications, its clues, in shape for handling by scientific methods. So, for example, does

the paleontologist work. Those curiously shaped and marked forms to which he is

devoted are not life, nor are they the literal termini of his endeavor; but through them as

signs and records

(248) he construes a life. And again, the painter-artist might well say that he is

concerned only with colored paints as such. Yet none the less through them as registers

and indices, he reveals to us the mysteries of sunny meadow, shady forest, and twilight

wave. These are the things-in-themselves of which the oils on his palette are

phenomena.

So the preoccupation of the psychologist with states of consciousness may signify that

they are the media, the concrete conditions to which he purposely reduces his material,

in order, through them, as methodological helps, to get at and understand that which is

anything but a state of consciousness. To him, however, who insists upon the fixed and

final limitation of psychology, the state of consciousness is not the shape some fact

takes from the exigency of investigation; it is literally the full fact itself. It is not an

intervening term; it bounds the horizon. Here, then, the issue defines itself. I conceive

that states of consciousness (and I hope you will take the phrase broadly enough to

cover all the specific data of psychology) have no existence before the psychologist

begins to work. He brings them into existence. What we are really after is the process of

experience, the way in which it arises and behaves. We want to know its course, its

history, its laws. We want to know its various typical forms; how each originates; how it

is related to others; the

( 249) part it plays in maintaining an inclusive, expanding, connected course of

experience. Our problem as psychologists is to learn its modus operandi, its method.

The paleontologist is again summoned to our aid. In a given district he finds a great

number and variety of footprints. From these he goes to work to construct the structure

and the life habits of the animals that made them. The tracks exist undoubtedly ; they

are there; but yet he deals with them not as final existences but as signs, phenomena in

the literal sense. Imagine the hearing that the critic would receive who should inform

the paleontologist that he is transcending his field of scientific activity; that his concern

is with footprints as such, aiming to describe each, to analyze it into its simplest forms,

to compare the different kinds with one another so as to detect common elements, and

finally, thereby, to discover the laws of their arrangement in space!

Yet the immediate data are footprints, and footprints only. The paleontologist does in a

way do all these things that our imaginary critic is urging upon him. The difference is

not that he arbitrarily lugs in other data; that he invents entities and faculties that are not

there. The difference is in his standpoint. His interest is in the animals, and the data are

treated in whatever way seems likely to serve this interest. So with the psycholo-

( 250) -gist. He is continually and perforce occupied with minute and empirical

investigation of special facts-states of consciousness, if you please. But these neither

define nor exhaust his scientific problem. They are his footprints, his clues through

which he places before himself the life-process he is studying-with the further

difference that his footprints are not after all given to him, but are developed by his

investigation.[2]

The supposition that these states are somehow existent by themselves and in this

existence provide the psychologist with ready-made material is just the supreme case of

the " psychological fallacy ": the confusion of experience as it is to the one experiencing

with what the psychologist makes out of it with his reflective analysis.

The psychologist begins with certain operations, acts, functions as his data. If these fall

out of

( 251) sight in the course of discussion, it is only because having been taken for granted,

they remain to control the whole development of the inquiry, and to afford the sterling

medium of redemption. Acts such as perceiving, remembering, intending, loving give

the points of departure; they alone are concrete experiences. To understand these

experiences, under what conditions they arise, and what effects they produce, analysis

into states of consciousness occurs. And the modes of consciousness that are figured

remain unarranged and unimportant, save as they may be translated back into acts.

To remember is to do something, as much as to shoe a horse, or to cherish a keepsake.

To propose, to observe, to be kindly affectioned, are terms of value, of practice, of

operation; just as digestion, respiration, locomotion express functions, not observable "

objects." But there is an object that may be described: lungs, stomach, leg-muscles, or

whatever. Through the structure we present to ourselves the function; it appears laid out

before us, spread forth in detail-objectified in a word. The anatomist who devotes

himself to this detail may, if lie please (and he probably does please to concentrate his

devotion) ignore the function: to discover what is there, to analyze, to measure, to

describe, gives him outlet enough. But nevertheless it is the function that fixed the

( 252) point of departure, that prescribed the problem and that set the limits, physical as

well as intellectual, of subsequent investigation. Reference to function makes the details

discovered other than a jumble of incoherent trivialities. One might as well devote

himself to the minute description of a square yard of desert soil were it not for this

translation. States of consciousness are the morphology of certain functions.[3] What is

true of analysis, of description, is true equally of classification. Knowing, willing,

feeling, name states of consciousness not in terms of themselves, but in terms of acts,

attitudes, found in experience.[4]

(253)

Explanation, even of an "empirical sort" is as impossible as determination of a "state"

and its classification, when we rigidly confine ourselves to modifications of

consciousness as a self-existent. Sensations are always defined, classified, and

explained by reference to conditions which, according to the theory, are extraneous-

sense-organs and stimuli. The whole physiological side assumes a ludicrously

anomalous aspect on this basis.[5] While experimentation is retained, and even made

much of, it is at the cost of logical coherence. To experiment with reference to a bare

state of consciousness is a performance of which one cannot imagine the nature, to say

nothing of doing it; while to experiment with reference to acts and the conditions of

their occurrence is a natural and straightforward undertaking. Such simple processes as

association are concretely inexplicable when

(254) we assume states of consciousness as existences by themselves. As recent

psychology testifies, we again have to resort to conditions that have no place nor calling

on the basis of the theory-the principle of habit, of neural action, or else some

connection in the object.[6]

We have only to note that there are two opposing schools in psychology to see in what

an unscientific status is the subject. We have only to consider that these two schools are

the result of assuming states of consciousness as existences per se to locate the source of

the scientific scandal. No matter what the topic, whether memory or association or

attention or effort, the same dualisms present themselves, the same necessity of

choosing between two schools. One, lost in the distinctions that it has developed, denies

the function because it can find objectively presented only states of consciousness. So it

abrogates the function, regarding it as a mere aggregate of such states, or as a purely

external and factitious re-

( 255) -lation between them. The other school, recognizing that this procedure explains

away rather than explains, the values of experience, attempts to even up by declaring

that certain functions are themselves immediately given data of consciousness, existing

side by side with the " states," but indefinitely transcending them in worth, and

apprehended by some higher organ. So against the elementary contents and external

associations of the analytic school in psychology, we have the complicated machinery

of the intellectualist school, with its pure self-consciousness as a source of ultimate

truths, its hierarchy of intuitions, its ready made faculties. To be sure, these " spiritual

faculties " are now largely reduced to some one comprehensive form Apperception, or

Will, or Attention, or whatever the fashionable term may be. But the principle remains

the same; the assumption of a function as a given existent, distinguishable in itself and

acting upon other existences-as if the functions digestion and vision were regarded as

separate from organic structures, somehow acting upon them from the outside so as to

bring cooperation and harmony into them![7] This division into psychological schools is

as reasonable as would be one of botanists into rootists and flowerists ; of

(256) those proclaiming the root to be the rudimentary and essential structure, and those

asserting that since the function of seed-bearing is the main thing, the flower is really

the controlling " synthetic " principle. Both sensationalist and intellectualist suppose

that psychology has some special sphere of " reality " or of experience marked off for it

within which the data are just lying around, self-existent and ready-made, to be picked

up and assorted as pebbles await the visitor on the beach. Both alike fail to recognize

that the psychologist first has experience to deal with; the same experience that the

zoologist, geologist, chemist, mathematician, and historian deal with, and that what

characterizes his specialty is not some data or existences which he may call uniquely his

own; but the problem raised-the problem of the course of the acts that constitute

experiencing.

Here psychology gets its revenge upon those who would rule it out of possession of

important philosophical bearing. As a matter of fact, the larger part of the questions that

are being discussed in current epistemology and what is termed metaphysic of logic and

ethic arise out of (and are hopelessly compromised by) this original assumption of "

consciousness as such "-in other words, are provoked by the exact reason that is given

for denying to psychology any essential meaning for epistemology and metaphysic.

Such is the

( 257) irony of the situation. The epistemologist's problem is, indeed, usually put as the

question of how the subject can so far "transcend" itself as to get valid assurance of the

objective world. The very phraseology in which the problem is put reveals the

thoroughness of the psychologist's revenge. Just and only because experience has been

reduced to " states of consciousness " as independent existences, does the question of

self-transcendence have any meaning. The entire epistemological industry is one shall I

say it---of a Sisyphean nature. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds of the metaphysic of

logic, ethic, and esthetic. In each case, the basic problem has come to be how a mere

state of consciousness can be the vehicle of a system of truth, of an objectively valid

good, of beauty which is other than agreeable feeling. We may, indeed, excuse the

psychologist for not carrying on the special inquiries that are the business of logical,

ethical, and esthetical philosophy; but can we excuse ourselves for forcing his results

into such a shape as to make philosophic problems so arbitrary that they are soluble

only by arbitrarily wrenching scientific facts?

Undoubtedly we are between two fires. In placing upon psychology the responsibility of

discovering the method of experience, as a sequence of acts and passions, do we not

destroy just that limitation to concrete detail which now constitutes

( 258) it a science? Will not the psychologist be the first to repudiate this attempt to mix

him up in matters philosophical? We need only to keep in mind the specific facts

involved in the term Course or Process of Experience to avoid this danger. The

immediate preoccupation of the psychologist is with very definite and empirical facts-

questions like the limits of audition, of the origin of pitch, of the structure and

conditions of the musical scale, etc. Just so the immediate affair of the geologist is with

particular rock-structures, of the botanist with particular plants, and so on. But through

the collection, description, location, classification of rocks the geologist is led to the

splendid story of world-forming. The limited, fixed, and separate piece of work is

dissolved away in the fluent and dynamic drama of the earth. So, the plant leads with

inevitableness to the whole process of life and its evolution.

In form, the botanist still studies the genus, the species, the plant-hardly, indeed, that;

rather the special parts, the structural elements, of the plant. In reality, he studies life

itself; the structures are the indications, the signature through which he renders

transparent the mystery of life growing in the changing world. It was doubtless

necessary for the botanist to go through the Linnean period-the period of engagement

with rigid detail and fixed classifications; of tear-

(259) -ing apart and piecing together; of throwing all emphasis upon peculiarities of

number, size, and appearance of matured structure; of regarding change, growth, and

function as external, more or less interesting, attachments to form. Examination of this

period is instructive; there is much in contemporary investigation and discussion that is

almost unpleasantly reminiscent in its suggestiveness. The psychologist should profit by

the intervening history of science. The conception of evolution is not so much an

additional law as it is a face-about. The fixed structure, the separate form, the isolated

element, is henceforth at best a mere stepping-stone to knowledge of process, and when

not at its best, marks the end of comprehension, and betokens failure to grasp the

problem.

With the change in standpoint from self-included existence to including process, from

structural unit of composition to controlling unity of function, from changeless form to

movement in growth, the whole scheme of values is transformed. Faculties are definite

directions of development; elements are products that are starting-points for new

processes; bare facts are indices of change; static conditions are modes of accomplished

adjustment. Not that the concrete, empirical phenomenon loses in worth, much less that

unverifiable " metaphysical " entities are impertinently introduced; but that our aim is

the discovery of a

(260) process of actions in its adaptations to circumstance. If we apply this evolutionary

logic in psychology, where shall we stop? Questions of limits of stimuli in a given

sense, say hearing, are in reality questions of temporary arrests, adjustments marking

the favorable equilibrium of the whole organism; they connect with the question of the

use of sensation in general and auditory sensations in particular for life-habits; of the

origin and use of localized and distinguished perception; and this, in turn, involves

within itself the whole question of space and time recognition; the significance of the

thing-and-quality experience, and so on. And when we are told that the question of the

origin of space experience has nothing at all to do with the question of the nature and

significance of the space experienced, the statement is simply evidence that the one who

makes it is still at the static standpoint; he believes that things, that relations, have

existence and significance apart from the particular conditions under which they come

into experience, and apart from the special service rendered in those particular

conditions.

Of course, I am far from saving that every psychologist must make the whole journey.

Each individual may contract, as he pleases, for any section or subsection he prefers;

and undoubtedly the well-being of the science is advanced by such divi-

( 261) -sion of labor. But psychology goes over the whole ground from detecting every

distinct act of experiencing, to seeing what need calls out the special organ fitted to cope

with the situation, and discovering the machinery through which it operates to keep a-

going the course of action.

But, I shall be told, the wall that divides psychology from philosophy cannot be so

easily treated as non-existent. Psychology is a matter of natural history, even though it

may be admitted that it is the natural history of the course of experience. But philosophy

is a matter of values; of the criticism and justification of certain validities. One deals, it

is said, with genesis, with conditions of temporal origin and transition; the other with

analysis, with eternal constitution. I shall have to repeat that just this rigid separation of

genesis and analysis seems to me a survival from a pre-evolutionary, a pre-historic age.

It indicates not so much an assured barrier between philosophy and psychology as the

distance dividing philosophy from all science. For the lesson that mathematicians first

learned, that physics and chemistry pondered over, in which the biological disciplines

were finally tutored, is that sure and delicate analysis is possible only through the

patient study of conditions of origin and development. The method of analysis in

mathematics is the method of construction. The experimental method

( 262) is the method of making, of following the history of production; the term " cause

" that has (when taken as an existent entity) so hung on the heels of science as to impede

its progress, has universal meaning when read as condition of appearance in a process.

And, as already intimated, the conception of evolution is no more and no less the

discovery of a general law of life than it is the generalization of all scientific method.

Everywhere analysis that cannot proceed by examining the successive stages of its

subject, from its beginning up to its culmination, that cannot control this examination by

discovering the conditions under which successive stages appear, is only preliminary. It

may further the invention of proper tools of inquiry, it may help define problems, it may

serve to suggest valuable hypotheses. But as science it breathes an air already tainted.

There is no way to sort out the results flowing from the subject-matter itself from those

introduced by the assumptions and presumptions of our own reflection. 'Not so with

natural history when it is worthy of its name. Here the analysis is the unfolding of the

existence itself. Its distinctions are not pigeon-holes of our convenience; they are stakes

that mark the parting of the ways in the process itself. Its classifications are not a grasp

at factors resisting further analysis; they are the patient tracings of the paths pursued.

Noth-

(263) -ing is more out of date than to suppose that interest in genesis is interest in

reducing higher forms to cruder ones: it is interest in locating the exact and objective

conditions under which a given fact appears, and in relation to which accordingly it has

its meaning. Nothing is more na�ve than to suppose that in pursuing " natural history "

(term of scorn in which yet resides the dignity of the world-drama) we simply learn

something of the temporal conditions under which a given value appears, while its own

eternal essential quality remains as opaque as before. Nature knows no such divorce of

quality and circumstance. Things come when they are wanted and as they are wanted;

their quality is precisely the response they give to the conditions that call for them,

while the furtherance they afford to the movement of their whole is their meaning. The

severance of analysis and genesis, instead of serving as a ready-made test by which to

try out the empirical, temporal events of psychology from the rational abiding

constitution of philosophy, is a brand of philosophic dualism: the supposition that

values are externally obtruded and statically set in irrelevant rubbish.

There are those who will admit that "states of consciousness" are but the cross-sections

of flow of behavior, arrested for inspection, made in order that we may reconstruct

experience in its life

( 264) history. Yet in the knowledge of the course and method of our experience, they

will hold that we are far from the domain proper of philosophy. Experience, they say, is

just the historic achievement of finite individuals; it tells the tale of approach to the

treasures of truth, of partial victory, but larger defeat, in laying hold of the treasure. But,

they say, reality is not the path to reality, and record of devious wanderings in the path

is hardly a safe account of the goal. Psychology, in other words, may tell us something

of how we mortals lay hold of the world of things and truths; of how we appropriate and

assimilate its contents; and of how we react. It may trace the issues of such approaches

and apprehensions upon the course of our own individual destinies. But it cannot wisely

ignore nor sanely deny the distinction between these individual strivings and

achievements, and the " Reality " that subsists and supports its own structure outside

these finite futilities. The processes by which we turn over The Reality into terms of our

fragmentary unconcluded, inconclusive experiences are so extrinsic to the Reality itself

as to have no revealing power with reference to it. There is the ordo ad universum, the

subject of philosophy; there is the ordo ad individuum, the subject of psychology.

Some such assumption as this lies latent, I am convinced, in all forswearings of the

kinship of

( 265) psychology and philosophy. Two conceptions hang together. The opinion that

psychology is an account only and finally of states of consciousness, and therefore can

throw no light upon the objects with which philosophy deals, is twin to the doctrine that

the whole conscious life of the individual is not organic to the world. The philosophic

basis and scope of this doctrine lie beyond examination here. But even in passing one

cannot avoid remarking that the doctrine is almost never consistently held; the doctrine

logically carried out leads so directly to intellectual and moral scepticism that the theory

usually prefers to work in the dark background as a disposition and temper of thought

rather than to make a frank statement of itself. Even in the half-hearted expositions of

the process of human experience as something merely annexed to the reality of the

.universe, we are brought face to face to the consideration with which we set out the

dependence of theories of the individual upon the position at a given time of the

individual practical and social. The doctrine of the accidental, futile, transitory

significance of the individual's experience as compared with eternal realities; the notion

that at best the individual is simply realizing for and in himself what already has fixed

completeness in itself is congruous only with a certain intellectual and political scheme

and must modify itself as that shifts. When such re-

(266) arrangement comes, our estimate of the nature and importance of psychology will

mirror the change.

When man's command of the methods that control action was precarious and disturbed;

when the tools that subject the world of things and forces to use and operation were rare

and clumsy, it was unavoidable that the individual should submit his perception and

purpose blankly to the blank reality beyond. Under such circumstances, external

authority must reign; the belief that human experience in itself is approximate, not-

intrinsic, is inevitable. Under such circumstances, reference to the individual, to the

subject, is a resort only for explaining error, illusion, and uncertainty. The necessity of

external control and external redemption of experience reports itself in a low valuation

of the self, and of all the factors and phases of experience that spring from the self. That

the psychology of medievalism should appear only as a portion of its theology of sin

and salvation is as obvious as that the psychology of the Greeks should be a chapter of

cosmology.

As against all this, the assertion is ventured that psychology, supplying us with

knowledge of the behavior of experience, is a conception of democracy. Its postulate is

that since experience fulfils itself in individuals, since it administers itself through their

instrumentality, the account of

( 267) the course and method of this achievement is a significant and indispensable

affair.

Democracy is possible only because of a change in intellectual conditions. It implies

tools for getting at truth in detail, and day by day, as we go along. Only such possession

justifies the surrender of fixed, all-embracing principles to which, as universals, all

particulars and individuals are subject for valuation and regulation. Without such

possession, it is only the courage of the fool that would undertake the venture to which

democracy has committed itself-the ordering of life in response to the needs of the

moment in accordance with the ascertained truth of the moment. Modern life involves

the deification of the here and the now; of the specific, the particular, the unique, that

which happens once and has no measure of value save such as it brings with itself. Such

deification is monstrous fetishism, unless the deity be there; unless the universal lives,

moves, and has its being in experience as individualized.[8] This con-

( 268) viction of the value of the individualized finds its further expression in

psychology, which undertakes to show how this individualization proceeds, and in what

aspect it presents itself.

Of course, such a conception means something for philosophy as well as for

psychology; possibly it involves for philosophy the larger measure of transformation. It

involves surrender of any claim on the part of philosophy to be the sole source of some

truths and the exclusive guardian of some

( 269) values. It means that philosophy be a method; not an assurance company, nor a

knight errant. It means an alignment with science. Philosophy may not be sacrificed to

the partial and superficial clamor of that which sometimes officiously and pretentiously

exhibits itself as Science. But there is a sense in which philosophy must go to school to

the sciences; must have no data save such as it receives at their bands; and be hospitable

to no method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in daily use among the sciences.

As long as it claims for itself special territory of fact, or peculiar modes of access to

truth, so long must it occupy a dubious position. Yet this claim it has to make until

psychology comes to its own. There is something in experience, something in things,

which the physical and the biological sciences do not touch; something, moreover,

which is not just more experiences or more existences; but without which their materials

are inexperienced, unrealized. Such sciences deal only with what might be experienced;

with the content of experience, provided and assumed there be experience. It is

psychology which tells us how this possible experience loses its barely hypothetical

character, and is stamped with categorical unquestioned experiencedness ; how, in a

word, it becomes here and now in some uniquely individualized life. Here is the

necessary transition of science into philosophy; a passage that carries the verified and

solid body of the one into the large and free form of the other.

[NOTE: I have let this paper stand much as written, though now conscious that much

more is crowded into it than could properly be presented in one paper. The drift of the

ten years from '99 to '09 has made, I venture to believe, for increased clearness in the

main positions of the paper: The revival of a naturalistic realism, the denial of the

existence of " consciousness," the development of functional and dynamic psychology

(accompanied by aversion to interpretation of functions as faculties of a soul-

substance)-all of these tendencies are sympathetic with the aim of the paper. There is

another reason for letting it stand: the new functional and pragmatic empiricism

proffered in this volume has been constantly objected to on the ground that its

conceptions of knowledge and verification lead only to subjectivism and solipsism. The

paper may indicate that the identification of experience with bare states of

consciousness represents the standpoint of the critic, not of the empiricism criticised,

and that it is for him, not for me, to fear the subjective implications of such a position.

The paper also clearly raises the question as to how far the isolation of "consciousness"

from nature and social life, which characterizes the procedure of many psychologists of

to-day, is responsible for keeping alive quite unreal problems in philosophy.]

Notes

1. Delivered as a public address before the Philosophic Union of the University of

California, with the title " Psychology and Philosophic Method," May, 1899, and

published in the University Chronicle for August, 1899. Reprinted, with slight

verbal changes, mostly excisions.

2. This is a fact not without its bearings upon the question of the nature and value

of introspection. The objection that introspection "alters" the reality and hence is

untrustworthy, most writers dispose of by saying that, after all, it need not alter

the reality so very much-not beyond repair and that, moreover, memory assists

in restoring the ruins. It would be simpler to admit the fact: that the purpose of

introspection is precisely to effect the right sort of alteration. If introspection

should give us the original experience again, we should just be living through

the experience over again in direct fashion; as psychologists we should not be

forwarded one bit. Reflection upon this obvious proposition may bring to light

various other matters worthy of note.

3. Thus to divorce " structure psychology " from " function psychology " is to

leave us without possibility of scientific comprehension of function, while it

deprives us of all standard of reference in selecting, observing, and explaining

the structure.

4. The following answer may fairly be anticipated: "This is true of the operations

cited, but only because complex processes have been selected. Such a term as

`knowing' does of course express a function involving a system of intricate

references. But, for that very reason, we go back to the sensation which is the

genuine type of the `state of consciousness' as such, pure and unadulterate and

unsophisticated." The point is large for a footnote, but the following

considerations are instructive: (1) The same psychologist will go on to inform us

that sensations, as we experience them, are networks of reference-they are

perceptual, and more or less conceptual even. From which it would appear that

whatever else they are or are not, the sensations, for which self-inclosed

existence is claimed, are not states of consciousness. And (2) we are told that

these are reached by scientific abstraction in order to account for complex forms.

From which it would appear that they are hypothecated as products of

interpretation and for purposes of further interpretation. Only the delusion that

the more complex forms are just aggregates (instead of being acts, like seeing,

hoping, etc.) prevents recognition of the point in question-that the "state of

consciousness " is an instrument of inquiry or methodological appliance.

5. "On the other hand, if what we are trying to get at is just the course and

procedure of experiencing, of course any consideration that helps distinguish

and make comprehensible that process is thoroughly pertinent.

6. It may avoid misunderstanding if I anticipate here a subsequent remark: that my

point is not in the least that "states of consciousness " require some "synthetic

unity" or faculty of substantial mind to effect their association. Quite the

contrary; for this theory also admits the "states of consciousness" as existences

in themselves also. My contention is that the "state of consciousness " as such is

always a methodological product, developed in the course and for the purposes

of psychological analysis.

7. The " functions " are in truth ordinary everyday acts and attitudes: seeing,

smelling, talking, listening, remembering, hoping, loving, fearing.

8. This is perhaps a suitable moment to allude to the absence, in this discussion, of

reference to what is sometimes termed rational psychology-the assumption of a

separate, substantialized ego, soul, or whatever, existing side by side with

particular experiences and "states of consciousness," acting upon them and acted

upon by them. In ignoring this and confining myself to the "states of

consciousness" theory and the "natural history" theory, I may appear not only to

have unduly narrowed the concerns at issue, but to have weakened my own

point, as this doctrine seems to offer a special vantage ground whence to defend

the close relationship of psychology and philosophy. The " narrowing," if such it

be, will have to pass-from limits of time and other matters. But the other point I

cannot concede. The independently existing soul restricts and degrades

individuality, making of it a separate thing outside of the full flow of things,

alien to things experienced and consequently in either mechanical or miraculous

relations to them. It is vitiated by just the quality already objected to-that

psychology has a separate piece of reality apportioned to it, instead of occupying

itself with the manifestation and operation of any and all existences in reference

to concrete action. From this point of view, the " states of consciousness"

attitude is a much more hopeful and fruitful one. It ignores certain

considerations, to be sure; and when it turns its ignoring into denial, it leaves us

with curious hieroglyphics. But after all, there is a key; these symbols can be

read; they may be translated into terms of the course of experience. When thus

translated, selfhood, individuality, is neither wiped out nor set up as a

miraculous and foreign entity; it is seen as the unity of reference and function

involved in all things when fully experienced-the pivot about which they turn.